open-consul/types/README.md

Consul types Package

The Go language has a strong type system built into the language. The types package corrals named types into a single package that is terminal in go's import graph. The types package should not have any downstream dependencies. Each subsystem that defines its own set of types exists in its own file, but all types are defined in the same package.

Why

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

string is a useful container and underlying type for identifiers, however the string type is effectively opaque to the compiler in terms of how a given string is intended to be used. For instance, there is nothing preventing the following from happening:

// `map` of Widgets, looked up by ID
var widgetLookup map[string]*Widget
// ...
var widgetID string = "widgetID"
w, found := widgetLookup[widgetID]

// Bad!
var widgetName string = "name of widget"
w, found := widgetLookup[widgetName]

but this class of problem is entirely preventable:

type WidgetID string
var widgetLookup map[WidgetID]*Widget
var widgetName

TL;DR: intentions and idioms aren't statically checked by compilers. The types package uses Go's strong type system to prevent this class of bug.