Understanding Reflection in Go: Types and Kinds

Reflection in Go is supported by the reflect package, which defines two essential types: Type and Value. In reflection, any value can be understood as composed of reflect.Type and reflect.Value. The reflect package provides two functions, reflect.TypeOf and reflect.ValueOf, to obtain the Value and Type of any object. In a Go program, you can use the reflect.TypeOf() function to get the type object (reflect.Type) of any value, and through this type object, you can access the type information of any value.

Compared to Type, Kind represents a broader category, similar to the relationship between home appliances (Kind) and television sets (Type). Alternatively, it's like the relationship between television sets (Kind) and 42-inch color television sets (Type). Type is the type, while Kind is the category. Type and Kind can be the same or different. Typically, the basic data types have the same Type and Kind, while custom data types have different ones. In reflection, you can obtain the kind through reflect.Type or reflect.Value, and the values and types obtained are the same.

Kinds represent the categories to which objects belong, and the reflect package defines them as follows:

type Kind uint
 ​
 const (
     Invalid Kind = iota
     Bool
     Int
     Int8
     Int16
     Int32
     Int64
     Uint
     Uint8
     Uint16
     Uint32
     Uint64
     Uintptr
     Float32
     Float64
     Complex64
     Complex128
     Array
     Chan
     Func
     Interface
     Map
     Ptr
     Slice
     String
     Struct…