How to keep track of the count of instances of a type?

Question

In object oriented languages I use class variables to track how many instances are currently spawned by incrementing on construction and decrementing on destruction.

I try to implement similar behaviour in go:

package entity

type Entity struct {
    Name string
}

func New(name string) Entity {
    entity := Entity{name}
    counter++
    return entity
}

var counter int = 0

func (e *Entity) Count() int {
    return counter
}

and that works half way as I can not decrement the counter via a destructor.

Can I somehow mimic object destruction? How would I keep track of instance count correctly?

Answer 1

You can use runtime.SetFinalizer like this. See here for playground version.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "runtime"
)

type Entity struct {
    Name string
}

var counter int = 0

func New(name string) Entity {
    entity := Entity{name}
    counter++
    runtime.SetFinalizer(&entity, func(_ *Entity) {
        counter--
    })
    return entity
}

func (e *Entity) Count() int {
    return counter
}

func main() {
    e := New("Sausage")
    fmt.Println("Entities", counter, e)
    e = New("Potato")
    fmt.Println("Entities", counter, e)
    runtime.GC()
    fmt.Println("Entities", counter)
    e = New("Leek")
    fmt.Println("Entities", counter)
    runtime.GC()
    fmt.Println("Entities", counter)
}

This prints

Entities 1 {Sausage}
Entities 2 {Potato}
Entities 0
Entities 1
Entities 0

Note this from the docs for gotchas with Finalizers

The finalizer for x is scheduled to run at some arbitrary time after x becomes unreachable. There is no guarantee that finalizers will run before a program exits, so typically they are useful only for releasing non-memory resources associated with an object during a long-running program.

Answer 2

There was a discussion on golang-nuts about finalizers.

For now,

• there is no finalizer function (edit : no reliable finalizer function, as was shown to me by Nick)
• the GC doesn't use and doesn't maintain any reference count

So you have to manage your instance count yourself.

Usually, you don't have instances living on themselves, so for many practical uses (not including the profiling of a complex and hard to understand program), you can use defer to track the end of life of your variables. I won't pretend this really replaces finalizers but it's simple and often sufficient.