Yesterday we learned that structs can have embedded fields. Although we didn’t really learn about any of the special powers this gives us. Today we’ll have a look at those powers.

One advantage to using an embedded type is that the implicit field name (the one derrived from the type, Person, in our example) can be omitted. This is the result of “promotion”. For example:

var e Employee
e.Name = "Bob" // equivalent to e.Person.Name = "Bob"
e.Age = 42     // equivalent to e.Person.Age = 42

Struct types

…

A field or method f of an embedded field in a struct x is called promoted if x.f is a legal selector that denotes that field or method f.

Wait, what?

This is just saying that the fields Name and Age, from the examples above, are called promoted fields.

Promoted fields act like ordinary fields of a struct except that they cannot be used as field names in composite literals of the struct.

As convenient as promoted fields are, they are not applicable for composite literals:

// Invalid, because Name and Age are promoted fields.
e1 := Employee{
	Name: "Bob",
	Age:  42,
}

// Valid, must include the literal Person value as well.
e2 := Employee{
	Person: Person{
		Name: "Bob",
    Age:  42,
	},
}

Quotes from The Go Programming Language Specification Version of December 15, 2022