OOP in New Language

What you will learn

How OOP is done in OOP-less languages like Go/Rust
What are Structs
How methods can be paired to structs

OOP in an OOP-less world

In recent years a debate in the world of Object Oriented Programming has ensued, that is the debate over inheritance over composition.

Inheritance You use base classes and other classes will inherit their base functionality from those classes. (Pig Inherits from Animal)
Composition Instead you have several possible smaller non-hierarchal pieces of functionality (traits) that can be constructed in an object as needed. (A pig is made of traits like CanMakeSound, IsMammal, CanWalk, etc.)

In languages like Go & Rust they made the decision to not include inheritance in the language in favor of composition so OOP patterns end up looking quite different in these language.

Creating a New Object

In javascript we define a class then we can instantiate the class

class Person {}

const AlexMerced = new Person();

In Go we define a struct (think data structure), and create an instance of the struct. (structs unlike classes can only have properties, no methods)

type Person struct {}

func main(){
  AlexMerced := Person{}
}

Properties of the Object

In Javascript we define properties in the constructor

class Person {
  constructor(name, age) {
    this.name = name;
    this.age = age;
  }
}

const AlexMerced = new Person("Alex Merced", 35);

console.log(AlexMerced);

In Go we define the properties in the struct and the properties must be defined at instantiation. If you want a constructor like function that may preset certain properties then you just create a normal function that returns a new instance of the struct.

package main

import "fmt"

type Person struct {
  name string
  age int
}

func main(){
  AlexMerced := Person{name: "Alex Merced", age: 35}
  fmt.Println(AlexMerced)
}

Adding Methods

In Javascript you could just define methods within the class

class Person {
  constructor(name, age) {
    this.name = name;
    this.age = age;
  }

  teach() {
    console.log(`${this.name} teaches code`);
  }
}

const AlexMerced = new Person("Alex Merced", 35);

AlexMerced.teach();

console.log(AlexMerced);

In Go you just create normal functions but can define structs as receivers so they can be used like methods.

package main

import "fmt"

type Person struct {
  name string
  age int
}

// define a function that receives a person
func (p Person) teach(){
  fmt.Println(p.name + " teaches!")
}

func main(){
  AlexMerced := Person{name: "Alex Merced", age: 35}
  fmt.Println(AlexMerced)
  AlexMerced.teach()
}

Learn More: