Inside Reflection

Reflection is a form of metaprogramming that often feels like magic — letting you inspect and manipulate your code at runtime. But there's no magic here at all — just clever engineering that makes your programs simpler and more flexible.

In this talk, we'll take a look at how reflection actually works under the hood in Go. We'll explore how types and values are represented at runtime, what really happens when you call reflect.ValueOf or reflect.TypeOf, and how the compiler keeps this dynamic capability simple, yet powerful in its implementation.

After this talk, reflection will look a little less mysterious — and a lot more elegant.