One of delights of using the Go programming language is how quickly Engineers can learn and start using the language; but at the same time, Engineers also “Copy/Paste” without some of the understanding.

Go’s empty interface interface{} is one such mystery when learning the language; Engineers are happy to use interface{} to represent any type, but get confused about the interface keyword and why it’s used.

let i:any = 1;          // Typescript
std::any i = 1;         // C++17
Object i = 1;           // Java
var i interface{} = 1   // Go

“interface{} says nothing” – Rob Pike

Interface type

Lets start with a regular interface:

type I interface {
	M()
}

type T struct {}

func (t T) M() {}

Type T has the M() method, therfore implements the I interface; interfaces are implemented implicitly in Go so there is no need explicitly declare that it does so.

Interface with no methods

If we now change the interface to the following, does type T still implement the interface?

type I interface {

}

type T struct {}

func (t T) M() {}

For T to implement the I interface, T is required to implement all the methods defined in the interface…

“How do you implement zero methods?”

I hope you already know the answer; T does implement I because it does not need to implement any methods to comply. Our final implementation can be reduced to:

type I interface{}
type T struct{}

func main() {
    var a I = &T{}
}

Empty interface

In Go we can delare types inline:

func main() {
    user := struct{
        ID string
        Name string
    }{
        "uuid_1234",
        "Roger",
    }
    fmt.Println(user)
    // output: {uuid_1234 Roger}
}

We can also declare an empty struct too:

done := make(chan struct{}, 1)
//...
done <- struct{}{}

“All types implement at least zero methods”

This now leads us to the empty interface:

var i interface{} = "x"

The empty interface is exactly the same interface I that we declared eairler; all types implement at least zero methods an therfore can be used to hold any value.

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