💻 Tech
In Go, we refer to methods as callable behaviors that are part of a struct. You’ll see it with a receiver before its name, just like (p Person) DisplayName(). In contrast, functions don’t have receivers. Under the hood, Go executes methods as functions. Bill Kennedy calls methods as syntactic sugar. You can see it in the code below.
The example code shows that you can actually call a method as function, which is not a normal coding style but it’s what Go does under the hood.
type Person struct {
Name string
Age int
}
func (p Person) DisplayName() {
fmt.Println(p.Name)
}
func (p *Person) SetAge(age int) {
p.Age = age
}
func main() {
p := Person{Name: "Joe"}
// How we normally call the method
p.DisplayName()
p.SetAge(12)
fmt.Println(p.Age)
// How Go is doing it; it's calling it as a function
Person.DisplayName(p)
(*Person).SetAge(&p, 21)
fmt.Println(p.Age)
}Output:
Joe
12
Joe
21