This is a topic that I’ve seen pop up in discussions and articles about Go. The Go programming language does not support inheritance, but instead it supports composition via “embedding.”

It can be a little hard to grasp the difference. This is especially so if you’ve worked in a language like C++, which implements inheritance by (literally) embedding the superclass object within the subclass object.

However, the semantics of Go’s embedding fail to support inheritance in important ways, and there are other Go features and idioms that we use to implement inheritance semantics (or something like them).