Embedded struct

Question

Is it possible to inherit methods of a type without using embedded structs?

The first snippet of code is working code that embeds the Property struct in

Answer 1

The short answer to your last question is simply No.

There is a big difference between type declaration and embedding in golang, you can make your last example working by manually make a type conversion between Node and Properties:

package main

import "fmt"

type Properties map[string]interface{}

func (p Properties) GetString(key string) string {
    return p[key].(string)
}

type Nodes map[string]*Node

type Node Properties

func main() {
    allNodes := Nodes{"1": &Node{"test": "foo"}} // :)
    singleNode := allNodes["1"]
    fmt.Println(Properties(*singleNode).GetString("test")) // :D
}

But it's clearly that is not what you want, you want a struct embedding with a syntax of type aliasing, which is not possible in golang, I think that you should stuck with the your first approach and ignore the the fact the code is redundant and ugly .