Passing an arbitrary function as a parameter in Go

Question

I'm trying to expand my knowledge of Go's function pointers, and I have a question about what is and is not possible with passing functions as parameters in Go.

Let's say that I want to write a decorator() function that can wrap any existing function. For simplicity, let's limit this to functions that accept exactly one parameter and return exactly one value.

If I write a decorator that accepts func(interface{}) interface{} as it's argument, it will implicitly work as long as that function I pass in also accepts/returns an interface{} type (see funcA).

My question is--is there a way to convert an existing function of type func(string) string to a type of func(interface{}) interface{} so that it can also be passed into a decorator function without just wrapping it in a new anonymous function (see funcB)?

package main

import (
    "fmt"
)

func decorate(inner func(interface{}) interface{}, args interface{}) interface {} {
    fmt.Println("Before inner")
    result := inner(args)
    fmt.Println("After inner")
    return result
}

func funcA(arg interface{}) interface{} {
    fmt.Print("Inside A, with arg: ")
    fmt.Println(arg)
    return "This is A's return value"
}

func funcB(arg string) string {
    fmt.Print("Inside B, with arg: ")
    fmt.Println(arg)
    return "This is B's return value"
}

func main() {
    
    // This one works. Output is:
    //
    //   Before inner
    //   Inside A, with arg: (This is A's argument)
    //   After inner
    //   This is A's return value
    //
    fmt.Println(decorate(funcA, "(This is A's argument)"))
    
    // This doesn't work. But can it?
    //fmt.Println(decorate(funcB, "(This is B's argument)"))
}

Answer 1

This is not possible. One reason for that is the mechanics of passing parameters differ from function to function, and using an interface{} arg does not mean "accept anything". For example, a function taking a struct as an arg will receive each member of that struct, but a function taking an interface{} containing that struct will receive two words, one containing the type of the struct, and the other containing a pointer to it.

So, without using generics, the only way to implement this is by using an adapter function.