Inheritance in Golang

Basically, Golang is not an OOP language so there is no inheritance concept in Golang. However, structs still can be extended through struct embedding. But keep in mind that if you redefine a property in your sub struct, struct embedding will not inherit the property from the embedded struct any more.

Now let’s take a look on the following example of struct embedding.

package main
import (
    "fmt"
)
type Animal struct {
    Age int
    Leg int
}
func (a *Animal) Move() {
    fmt.Println("An animal moves by ", a.Leg, " legs.")
}
type Dog struct {
    Animal
    Leg int
}
func (d *Dog) Move() {
    fmt.Println("A dog moves by ", d.Leg, " legs.")
}
func main() {
    animal := Animal{
        Age: 5, 
        Leg: 2,
    }
    // Output: "An animal moves by  2  legs."
    animal.Move()
 
    dog := Dog{
        Animal: Animal{Age: 5, Leg: 4},
    }
    // Here if you expect an output of "A dog moves by 4 legs." then you never get it.
    // Instead you will get "A dog moves by  0  legs."
    dog.Move()
}

In you are interested in this example, you can test it on Golang playground at https://play.golang.org/p/xUYw53rMTXj