An interface is an abstract type. It doesn’t expose the representation or internal structure of its values, or the set of basic operations they support; it reveals only some of their methods. When you have a value of an interface type, you know nothing about what it is; you know only what it can do, or more precisely, what behaviors are provided by its methods.
For each named concrete type T, some of its methods have a receiver of type T itself whereas others require a *T pointer. Recall also that it is legal to call a *T method on an argument of type T so long as the argument is a variable; the compiler implicitly takes its address. But this is mere syntactic sugar: a value of type T does not possess all the methods that a *T pointer does, and as a result it might satisfy fewer interfaces.
interface{}, which is called the empty interface type, is indispensable. Because the empty interface type places no demands on the types that satisfy it, we can assign any value to the empty interface.
Since interface satisfaction depends only on the methods of the two types involved, there is no need to declare the relationship between a concrete type and the interfaces it satisfies. That said, it is occasionally useful to document and assert the relationship when it is intended but not otherwise enforced by the program.
Conceptually, a value of an interface type, or interface value, has two components, a concrete type and a value of that type. These are called the interface’s dynamic type and dynamic value.
For a statically typed language like Go, types are a compile-time concept, so a type is not a value. In our conceptual model, a set of values called type descriptors provide information about each type, such as its name and methods. In an interface value, the type component is represented by the appropriate type descriptor.
An interface value is described as nil or non-nil based on its dynamic type. You can test whether an interface value is nil using w == nil or w != nil. Calling any method of a nil interface value causes a panic.
In general, we cannot know at compile time what the dynamic type of an interface value will be, so a call through an interface must use dynamic dispatch. Instead of a direct call, the compiler must generate code to obtain the address of the method from the type descriptor, then make an indirect call to that address. The receiver argument for the call is a copy of the interface’s dynamic value.
Interface values may be compared using == and !=. Two interface values are equal if both are nil, or if their dynamic types are identical and their dynamic values are equal according to the usual behavior of == for that type. Because interface values are comparable, they may be used as the keys of a map or as the operand of a switch statement.
However, if two interface values are compared and have the same dynamic type, but that type is not comparable (a slice, for instance), then the comparison fails with a panic.
A type assertion is an operation applied to an interface value. Syntactically, it looks like x.(T), where x is an expression of an interface type and T is a type, called the “asserted” type. A type
assertion checks that the dynamic type of its operand matches the asserted type.
There are two possibilities. First, if the asserted type T is a concrete type, then the type assertion checks whether x’s dynamic type is identical to T. If this check succeeds, the result of the type assertion is x’s dynamic value, whose type is of course T. In other words, a type assertion to a concrete type extracts the concrete value from its operand. If the check fails, then the operation panics.
Second, if instead the asserted type T is an interface type, then the type assertion checks whether x’s dynamic type satisfies T. If this check succeeds, the dynamic value is not extracted; the result is still an interface value with the same type and value components, but the result has the interface type T. In other words, a type assertion to an interface type changes the type of the expression, making a different (and usually larger) set of methods accessible, but it preserves the dynamic type and value
components inside the interface value.
No matter what type was asserted, if the operand is a nil interface value, the type assertion fails. A type assertion to a less restrictive interface type (one with fewer methods) is rarely needed, as it behaves just like an assignment, except in the nil case.