Type literals

After a long-winded post yesterday, here’s a shorter one to breeze through…

Types

… A type may also be specified using a type literal, which composes a type from existing types.

Type      = TypeName [ TypeArgs ] | TypeLit | "(" Type ")" .
TypeName  = identifier | QualifiedIdent .
TypeArgs  = "[" TypeList [ "," ] "]" .
TypeList  = Type { "," Type } .
TypeLit   = ArrayType | StructType | PointerType | FunctionType | InterfaceType |
            SliceType | MapType | ChannelType .

You’ve already seen these. []byte, *string and Struct { Name string; Age int } are all examples of type literals. There are many more type literals for specific types, which we’ll get to in the coming days.

We’re also skipping over TypeArgs and TypeList, which are related to generic types, for the time being.

Quotes from The Go Programming Language Specification, Version of January 19, 2023

Related Content

Context key type: Final recommendation

First, a correction! An astute reader pointed out that I made a small mistake in my post on June, 10, with regard to string context keys. My code example showed: type contextKey string const ( KeyUserID = "user_id" KeyTransactionID = "transaction_id" KeyMessageID = "message_id" ) But it should have been: type contextKey string const ( KeyUserID contextKey = "user_id" KeyTransactionID contextKey = "transaction_id" KeyMessageID contextKey = "message_id" ) This is a nasty kind of bug, because the code will continue to work as expected—just without any protection from key collisions!

Struct context keys

First off, an apology for being rather unreliable with my “daily” emails. I’m in the middle of some traveling (was in the UK and Netherlands last week, and will be on a US road trip starting tomorrow), so I’m writing when I have a spare moment, which isn’t that often. I’ve been talking about finding the ideal type for a context key. So far I’ve looked at empty structs (e.g. struct{}), integers, and strings.

String context keys

By now we’ve looked at empty structs (struct{}), and integers as possible context key types. Today, let’s consider string context keys. type contextKey string const ( KeyUserID contextKey = "user_id" KeyTransactionID contextKey = "transaction_id" KeyMessageID contextKey = "message_id" ) How does this stack up against our 5 criteria? Must be comparable. ✅ Check. Use minimal memory. ✅ Using a string will typically use a bit more memory than an integer (typically 32 bytes vs 16), but still quite minimal.