Struct composition with Go

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This is a quick Friday blog post to talk about a recent experience I had working on a piece Juju code that needed to capture the data being sent over a net.Conn.

Most Gophers know that the net package provides a net.Pipe function which returns a pair of net.Conns representing an in memory network connection. net.Pipe is ideal for testing components that expect to talk over the network without all the mucking around of actually using the network.

The Go standard library also contains the super useful io.MultiWriter function which takes any number of io.Writers and returns another io.Writer that will send a copy of any data written to it to each of its underlying io.Writers. Now I had all the pieces I needed to create a net.Conn that could record the data written through it.

func main() {        client, server := net.Pipe()        var buf bytes.Buffer        client = io.MultiWriter(client, &buf)        // ...}

Except this code does not compile.

# command-line-arguments/tmp/sandbox866813815/main.go:13: cannot use io.MultiWriter(client, &buf) (type io.Writer) as type net.Conn in assignment:io.Writer does not implement net.Conn (missing Close method)

The value returned by io.MultiWriter is an implementation of io.Writer, it doesn’t have the rest of the methods necessary to fulfil the net.Conn interface; what I really need is the ability to replace the Write method of an existing net.Conn value. We can do this with embedding by creating a structure that embeds both a net.Conn and an independant io.Writer as anonymous fields.

type recordingConn struct {        net.Conn        io.Writer}func main() {        client, server := net.Pipe()        var buf bytes.Buffer        client = &recordingConn {                Conn: client,                Writer: io.MultiWriter(client, &buf),        }        // ...}

The recodingConn embeds a net.Conn ensuring that recordingConn implements net.Conn. It also gives us a place to hang the io.MultiWriter so we can syphon off the data written by the client. There is only one small problem remaining.

# command-line-arguments/tmp/sandbox439875759/main.go:24: recordingConn.Write is ambiguous

Because both fields in the structure are types that have a Write method, the compiler cannot decide which one should be the called. To resolve this ambiguity we can add a Write method on the recordingConn type itself:

func (c *recordingConn) Write(buf []byte) (int, error) {        return c.Writer.Write(buf)}

With the ambiguity resolved, the recordingConn is now usable as a net.Conn implementation. You can see the full code here.

This is just a small example of the power of struct composition using Go. Can you think of other ways to do this ?

Related posts:

1. The empty struct
2. How to dial remote SSL/TLS services in Go
3. Three new SSH client features in Go weekly.2011-11-18
4. Accidental method value