嵌入式结构方法可以了解父/子吗？

Question

I have been working with Go on and off on my free time for a few months and I feel I've been getting a hang of it. Coming from traditional OOP languages, such as Java and PHP, I had a hard time grasping composition and embedding in Go. I think it finally clicked recently and want to use it more, but I have hit a roadblock for one idea I have.

Lets say I have a struct from a package that has a Validate method and I embedded that in my struct in the package I am currently working in. Is there a way (I own both packages) that I can get a reference to the struct that is doing the embedding inside of the Validate method? Kind of like a way to see who called me since I would be calling it on the "parent" instead of the embedded.

I'll try to visualize this...

type B struct {}
func (b B) Validate() {
  // get reference somehow of A obj
}


type A struct {
  B
}

a := A{B{}}
a.Validate()

I feel as though this isn't possible, but it would be cool if you could. I'd imagine that you would need to make A and B both the same interface type for this to work. Any thoughts or help will be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Any kind of parent reference is impossible. What would you hope to do with the parent? Since they would be potentially widely different types, they would be incompatible to do anything meaningful with.

If you need something in common between different types you want an interface, and you will need to pass it in:

type B struct {}
func (b B) Validate(parent MyInterface) {
}


type A struct {
  B
}
// A implements MyInterface
a := A{B{}}
a.Validate(a)

If you can explain what you are actually trying to accomplish there is almost certainly a better way than this.