A quick reminder: In today’s live stream, I’ll be deploying a Go app to Kubernetes! I hope you’ll join me!

Today we continue the explanation of Method values. There’s nothing too surprising today. The spec mostly just confirms what should seem natural…

Method values

…

As in the discussion of method expressions above, consider a struct type T with two methods, Mv, whose receiver is of type T, and Mp, whose receiver is of type *T.

type T struct {
	a int
}
func (tv  T) Mv(a int) int         { return 0 }  // value receiver
func (tp *T) Mp(f float32) float32 { return 1 }  // pointer receiver

var t T
var pt *T
func makeT() T

The expression

t.Mv

yields a function value of type

func(int) int

These two invocations are equivalent:

t.Mv(7)
f := t.Mv; f(7)

Similarly, the expression

pt.Mp

yields a function value of type

func(float32) float32

Again, nothing super surprising here. The main contrast with method expressions is that the receiver type is not reflected in the final function value type. That is to say, regardless of whether the method has a pointer or value receiver, the function value has the same type. In fact, regardless of the receiver’s base type, the function value is the same, given the same method signature:

type Person struct {
	/* ... */
}

func (p Person) Greet(name string) {}
func (p *Person) SayHi(name string) {}

type Dog string

func (d Dog) Speak(sound string) {}

var (
	p Person
	d Dog

	x = p.Greet // x, y, and z all
	y = p.SayHi // have the same type:
	z = d.Speak // func(string)
)

Quotes from The Go Programming Language Specification Version of August 2, 2023