Is it possible to call a struct constructor through make() in go?

Question

Is there a better way to allocate the contents of this array, such as automatically calling the NewThing() constructor instead of manually constructing each element?

package main

import "sync"

type Thing struct {
    lock *sync.RWMutex
    data chan int
}

func NewThing() *Thing {
    return &Thing{ lock: new(sync.RWMutex), data: make(chan int) }
}

func main() {
    n := 10
    things := make([]*Thing, n)
    for i := 10; i < n; i++ {
        things[i] = NewThing()
    }
}

I realize i'm allocating an array of pointers, my other attempts were unsuccessful and data was not an initialized channel. This is just a contrived example.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can simply write:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "sync"
)

type Thing struct {
    lock *sync.RWMutex
    data chan int
}

func NewThing() *Thing {
    return &Thing{lock: new(sync.RWMutex), data: make(chan int)}
}

func NewThings(n int) []*Thing {
    things := make([]*Thing, n)
    for i := range things {
        things[i] = NewThing()
    }
    return things
}

func main() {
    things := NewThings(3)

    fmt.Println("things: ", len(things))
    for _, thing := range things {
        fmt.Println(thing)
    }
}

Output:

things:  3
&{0xc200061020 0xc200062000}
&{0xc200061040 0xc200062060}
&{0xc200061060 0xc2000620c0}