Types

The go-ethereum project defines 57 types. Only some of them are discussed in this documentation.

This section describes critical data structures used in go-ethereum. The main categories of types defined by this documentation are:

• Common – foundational types used throughout
• Database – defines blockchain data structures
• Peer to Peer – defines Ethereum nodes
• Smart Contract – defines data structures for smart contracts

Public / Private Visibility

Remember, publicly visible methods and properties in Go (those that are exported) are denoted by having names that start with a capital letter. Private scope is denoted by names starting with a lower-case letter.

If a data structure / type has no publicly visible data members, the only way to access its properties from other packages are via public methods.

Incantation: Counting Types

The following incantation reports the number of types in the go-ethereum project:

grep -rIhw --include \*.go "^\s*Type\s*" | \
  tr -d ',' | tr -d ':' | sed 's^//.*^^' | awk '{$1=$1};1' | \
  sort | uniq | wc -l