Advanced Techniques in Go Programming/

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Interfaces vs. Generics

Interfaces vs. Generics

Let’s compare interfaces and generics in Go.

We'll cover the following...

This lesson presents a program that increments a numeric value by one using interfaces and generics so that we can compare the implementation details.

Coding example

The interfaces.go code illustrates the two techniques and contains the next code:

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package main
import (
	"fmt"
)
type Numeric interface {
    type int, int8, int16, int32, int64, float64
}

This is where we define a constraint named Numeric for limiting the permitted data types.

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func Print(s interface{}) {
	// type switch
	switch s.(type) {

The Print() function uses the empty interface for getting input and a type switch to work with that input parameter.

Put simply, we are using a type switch to differentiate between the supported data types—in this case, the supported ...