<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> Hi folks, some time back, we have introduced the "Equaler" interface. I believe we're going down the wrong path with this: Java got this wrong initially and we still suffer the consequences. Equaler looks like this: type Equaler interface { Equal(Equaler) bool } There are a couple of drawbacks to this approach: <ol> <li>There can only be a single implementation of Equals for all time. But this too restrictive: for example, I might want to include the version field in a struct in the comparison for some cases, in other cases I simply don't care. Generally, there can be many equivalence relationships for a given set of objects. For all we know, we might consider two objects equal if they have the same color.</li> <li>You can't compose equality with this implementation In Java, this has given rise to classes like "EqualsBuilder" that allowed to do exactly that. </li> <li>We can't implement equality based on interfaces We'd have to reimplement equality for every struct (which is the first parameter).</li> <li>You always have to check for null before calling Equals()</li> </ol> So I propose to rewrite the interface to : Equality { Equals(left interface{}, right interface{}) bool } I think it would make sense that I prepare a PR to illustrate my approach porting the current implementations in the "models" packe. A POC shouldn't take too long. thoughts? /Thomas </body> </html>