Receiver types in Go - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Understanding Receiver Types in Go

📖 Scenario: Imagine you are creating a simple program to manage a bank account. You want to add money and check the balance using methods attached to your account.

🎯 Goal: Build a Go program that defines a BankAccount struct and uses both pointer and value receiver methods to modify and read the account balance.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a struct called BankAccount with a field balance of type float64

Write a method Deposit with a pointer receiver that adds an amount to the balance

Write a method Balance with a value receiver that returns the current balance

Create a main function to demonstrate using both methods

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Managing bank accounts or any data where you need to update or read values using methods.

💼 Career

Understanding receiver types is essential for writing clear and efficient Go code, especially in backend development and systems programming.

1

Create the BankAccount struct

Create a struct called BankAccount with a field balance of type float64.

Go

type BankAccount struct {
    // Your code here
}

Hint

Use the type keyword to define a struct and add a field named balance with type float64.

2

Add a Deposit method with pointer receiver

Add a method called Deposit with a pointer receiver (acc *BankAccount) that takes a parameter amount float64 and adds it to acc.balance.

Go

package main

type BankAccount struct {
    balance float64
}

// Your code here

Hint

Use a pointer receiver so the method can change the original balance field.

3

Add a Balance method with value receiver

Add a method called Balance with a value receiver (acc BankAccount) that returns the current balance as float64.

Go

package main

type BankAccount struct {
    balance float64
}

func (acc *BankAccount) Deposit(amount float64) {
    acc.balance += amount
}

// Your code here

Hint

Use a value receiver because this method only reads data and does not modify it.

4

Use the methods in main and print the balance

In the main function, create a variable account of type BankAccount. Call Deposit(100.0) on account. Then print the result of account.Balance().

Go

package main

func main() {
    // Your code here
}

Hint

Create the account variable, call Deposit with 100.0, then print account.Balance().