You definitely can't rely on it. Just the other day I was given a task to take a request payload from our front end and do some stuff with it on our backend. Th

You definitely can't rely on it. Just the other day I was given a task to take a request payload from our front end and do some stuff with it on our backend. The payload looked like this: {"thing": [{"values": ["foobar"], "type": "blah blah"}, "some identifier"], "other thing": "some string"}. It's mixing types in arrays which is problematic for most statically types languages. Tips for Go: Don't use map[string]interface{} and circumvent the type system (I've seen this a lot in production). The fix involves the UnmarshalJSON and MarshalJSON interfaces. This lets you put the data into a structure that's sane and re-encode it back to something the other system expects.