How can &deployment satisfy type runtime.Object in kubernetes code?

Question

In kubectl/run.go in Kubernetes code, the Generate function has a result list of these two types:

runtime.Object, error

The last line of the function is:

return &deployment, nil

runtime is imported:

k8s.io/apimachinery/pkg/runtime

I got runtime by running go get on that import statement, and Object is defined in interfaces.go:

type Object interface {
    GetObjectKind() schema.ObjectKind
    DeepCopyObject() Object
}

(And I found the same code on the web here.)

The address operator creates a pointer... more specifically, the Go spec states:

For an operand x of type T, the address operation &x generates a pointer of type *T to x.

and pointers have a type distinct from their base type:

A pointer type denotes the set of all pointers to variables of a given type, called the base type of the pointer.

How does &deployment satisfy the runtime.Object type?

My best guess so far is that deployment implements the runtime.Object interface, and mapping &deployment to runtime.Object satisfies this rule of assignability:

T is an interface type and x implements T.

and that a return statement mapping to a result list type is equivalent to assignment in this respect. Is this correct? If not, is there another part of the specification or documentation that explains it?

Answer 1

deployment is a local variable, its declaration:

deployment := extensionsv1beta1.Deployment{
    // ...
}

Where extensionsv1beta1 from the imports:

import (
    // ...
    extensionsv1beta1 "k8s.io/api/extensions/v1beta1"
    // ...
)

Doc of extensionsv1beta1.Deployment. Its definition is:

type Deployment struct {
    metav1.TypeMeta `json:",inline"`
    // ...other fields...
}

It embeds metav1.TypeMeta, which has a method GetObjectKind() method with pointer receiver. This means a pointer to Deployment also has this method, because Spec: Struct types:

Given a struct type S and a defined type T, promoted methods are included in the method set of the struct as follows:

• If S contains an embedded field T, the method sets of S and *S both include promoted methods with receiver T. The method set of *S also includes promoted methods with receiver *T.

And Deployment has a "direct" DeepCopyObject() method, again with pointer receiver. So the method set of *Deployment contains this method.

And last quoting Spec: Interface types:

An interface type specifies a method set called its interface. A variable of interface type can store a value of any type with a method set that is any superset of the interface. Such a type is said to implement the interface.

So this means the method set of *Deployment has all the methods defined by Object, or in other words: the method set of *Deployment is a superset of the method set of Object, so *Deployment implements Object.

deployment is of type extensionsv1beta1.Deployment, which means &deployment is of type *extensionsv1beta1.Deployment, which we showed above that it implements Object; so the value &deployment can be assigned to or be stored in a variable of type Object.