[B-Con]

I generally advise to avoid introducing interfaces strictly for testing. Instead, design the data types themselves to be testable and only use interfaces when you expect to need differing implementations. ie, avoid premature abstraction and you get rid of a whole class of problems.

For example, if you only use S3, it is premature abstraction to accept an interface for something that may not be S3. Just accept the S3 client itself as input.

Then the S3 client can be designed to be testable by itself by having the lowest-level dependencies (ie, network calls) stubbed out. For example, it can take a fake implementation that has hard-coded S3 URLs mapped to blobs. Everything that tests code with S3 simply has to pre-populate a list of URLs and blobs they need for the test, which itself can be centralized or distributed as necessary depending on the way the code is organized.

Generally, I/O is great level to use an interface and to stub out. Network, disk, etc. Then if you have good dependency injection practicies, it becomes fairly easy to use real structs in testing and to avoid interfaces purely for testing.

Related reading from the Google style guide, but focused specifically on the transport layer: https://google.github.io/styleguide/go/best-practices.html#u...

[imiric]

I agree with not introducing abstractions prematurely, but your suggestion hinges on the design of the S3 client. In practice, if your code is depending on a library you have no control over, you'll have to work with interfaces if you want to prevent your tests from doing I/O. So in unit tests you can pass an in-memory mock/stub, and in integration tests, you can pass a real S3 client, and connect to a real S3 server running locally.

So I don't see dependency injection with interfaces as being premature abstractions. You're simply explicitly specifying the API your code depends on, instead of depending on a concrete type of which you might only use one or two methods. I think this is a good pattern to follow in general, with no practical drawbacks.

[B-Con]

Yes, this is absolutely dependent on the design S3 client.

The reality of development is we have to merge different design philosophies into one code base. Things can get messy. 100% agreed.

The approach I advocate for is more for a) organizing the code you do own, and b) designing in a way that you play nice with others who may import your code.