Functions are as important as in most programming languages. The first function you encounter when writing your first go project, is the “main” function:
You can specify the inputs and outputs of functions, here we have two inputs: x & y, both of type ints. We also specify the output type, also of type int:
Though we only specified one output type in the previous example you are able to return several values from a Go function:
In the previous examples we have two input parameters: x & y, whily we specified the type for each parameter explicitly there is a shorthand way to do it:
Another type of function in Go, is Variadic functions. Which are functions that will take an arbitrary number of ints as arguments:
Here we take an arbitrary number of numbers (“nums”) of type int, summing those up and returning that sum. Calling a variadic function, is just like calling other functions, you just have the possibility to have a dynamic amount of inputs to the function:
A third type of function in Go, is the anonymous function. Anonymous functions are quite useful when you want to define an inline function, in places where defining it with a name does not matter.
Here is an example of a function that returns another function: an anonymous function:
The fourth and last type of function that i will touch on in this article, is recursive functions. Recursive functions are functions that continously calls themselves. This can end up in an infinite loop, if you dont have a guard clause to cause the function to return. In the following example, this clause is defined by the if statement. A classic example to show recursion is calculating fibonacci numbers:
