Constructors in Go

Question

I have a struct and I would like it to be initialised with some sensible default values.

Typically, the thing to do here is to use a constructor but since go isn\'t

Answer 1

There are no default constructors in Go, but you can declare methods for any type. You could make it a habit to declare a method called "Init". Not sure if how this relates to best practices, but it helps keep names short without loosing clarity.

package main

import "fmt"

type Thing struct {
    Name string
    Num int
}

func (t *Thing) Init(name string, num int) {
    t.Name = name
    t.Num = num
}

func main() {
    t := new(Thing)
    t.Init("Hello", 5)
    fmt.Printf("%s: %d\n", t.Name, t.Num)
}

The result is:

Hello: 5