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Sunday, October 13, 2013

Google Go (Part 3, Types)

In the previous two posts, I introduced Google's Go programming language and the model of concurrent programming that it adopts. We've seen that Google has made a number of interesting choices in the design of the language, and their approach to types is yet another. There are two key parts that define how types work in Go: "static duck typing" and the absence of inheritance. The former is not too unusual, as most dynamic languages have duck typing and Scala, for example, has structural typing. Completely throwing away the concept of inheritance, however, is a bold statement about how object-oriented programming should be done. Let's take a look at each of these in a little more detail.

Duck typing is prevalent nowadays, with dynamic languages like JavaScript and Python being so popular. To some people, however, it might be comforting to have the guarantee that when your code runs it won't suddenly crash due to a method not existing when you expected it to. That's the guarantee of statically typed language, but the concept is often associated with more "burdensome" programming languages such as C++ and Java. Go is a statically typed language, but it does so without an explicit type hierarchy; as long as an object presents the methods in an interface, it can be considered an implementation of the interface (hence duck typing). For example:


Here we have two interfaces, UnaryFunction and UnaryInvertible, which each have a single method. Then we have two classes/structs PlusOne and MinusOne which implement both interfaces (not explicitly specified). Note that we are able to pass around instances of PlusOne and MinusOne as either UnaryFunction or UnaryInvertible objects because the Go compiler is able to determine that they satisfy the signatures of the interfaces. So while it feels like we are doing dynamic typing without any guarantee that methods exist, the compiler is simply inferring the type relationships that we intended. This is cool because it lets programmers design interfaces around the true functionality without having to worry about how to deal with existing code or polluting the codebase with "implements" statements (and is still type safe!). For details as to how Go implements method dispatching efficiently, refer to this blog post.

Now on to the bigger question: why did the designers of Go decide to get rid of inheritance altogether? It is well-known that programmers often use inheritance when they should instead be using composition. In fact, the idea of using composition over inheritance is important enough to have a Wikipedia article of its own. I found an excellent summary of when to choose composition versus inheritance in this Stack Overflow post, which essentially says that inheritance should only be used when you want the complete public interface of the superclass. The Liskov substitution principle is a formal specification of this rule of thumb and makes the requirements for inheritance very strict: "in a computer program, if S is a subtype of T, then objects of type T may be replaced with objects of type S (i.e., objects of type S may be substituted for objects of type T) without altering any of the desirable properties of that program (correctness, task performed, etc.)." In theory, this is quite sensible: inheritance is supposed to specify an "is-a" relationship, so an instance of the subclass should be able to be treated as an instance of the superclass in all cases.

The designers of Go believe that forcing programmers to use composition instead of inheritance in all cases results in code that is less brittle and adapts better to new requirements. Specifically, "the [type] hierarchy must be designed early, often as the first step of designing the program, and early decisions can be difficult to change once the program is written. As a consequence, the model encourages early overdesign as the programmer tries to predict every possible use the software might require, adding layers of type and abstraction just in case. This is upside down. The way pieces of a system interact should adapt as it grows, not be fixed at the dawn of time." I understand the problems that they are addressing having dealt with type hierarchies that grow and grow until they become impossible to understand. The idea of decoupling independent pieces of functionality that come together to produce a class fits the mantra of modularity being the key to building scalable programs, and perhaps Go taking such an extreme stance is a message to us saying that we're not programming in the correct way.

This wraps up my series of posts on Go. I think Google has done a great job of identifying a number of important areas of programming that could use some innovation. Go puts forth some options for how we can improve things, but they are certainly not the only ones available. I am very keen on learning about whether people have reaped the expected benefits of Go's design decisions and which ones are the most effective. In the future, I am sure we will see new and existing languages try to incorporate some of the ideas behind Go that seem strange now but may turn out to be essential.

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