Advanced Techniques in Go Programming/

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Reflection vs. Generics

Reflection vs. Generics

Let’s compare reflection and generics in Go.

We'll cover the following...

In this lesson, we’ll develop a utility that prints the elements of a slice in two ways: first, using reflection, and second, using generics.

Coding example

The code of reflection.go is as follows:

Go (1.19.0)
package main
import (
	"fmt"
	"reflect"
)
func PrintReflection(s interface{}) {
	fmt.Println("** Reflection")
	val := reflect.ValueOf(s)
	if val.Kind() != reflect.Slice {
		return
	}
	for i := 0; i < val.Len(); i++ {
		fmt.Print(val.Index(i).Interface(), " ")
	}
	fmt.Println()
}

Internally, the PrintReflection() function works with slices only. However, because we can’t express that in the function ...