Go - any says nothing

With Go 1.18, the predeclared type any became an alias for an empty interface; hence, all the interface{} occurrences can be replaced by any.

 

If future developers need to use the Store struct, they will probably have to dig into the documentation or read the code to understand how to use these methods. Hence, accepting or returning an any type doesn’t convey meaningful information. Also, because there is no safeguard at compile time, nothing prevents a caller from calling these methods with whatever data type.

By using any, we lose some of the benefits of Go as a statically typed language. Instead, we should avoid any types and make our signatures explicit as much as possible. Regarding our example, this could mean duplicating the Get and Set methods per type:

In this version, the methods are expressive, reducing the risk of incomprehension. Having more methods isn’t necessarily a problem because clients can also create their own abstraction using an interface. For example, if a client is interested only in the Contract methods, it could write something like this:

In summary, any can be helpful if there is a genuine need for accepting or returning any possible type (for instance, when it comes to marshaling or formatting). In general, we should avoid overgeneralizing the code we write at all costs. Perhaps a little bit of duplicated code might occasionally be better if it improves other aspects such as code expressiveness.