As you pointed out, path types are awfully specialized to the OS and really even the file system itself. It is not clear that "Go" could provide such a thing. I

As you pointed out, path types are awfully specialized to the OS and really even the file system itself. It is not clear that "Go" could provide such a thing. It doesn't need to, really, you can relatively easily create a type for the specific case you have. type PathSegment struct { path string // not exported, so only the empty one can be created externally } func MakePath(in string) (PathSegment, error) { // validate the input here } You'll need some more supporting types, of course, but it doesn't have to be provided by "Go" itself. (I have something rather like this in my codebase, though it is specialized to just Unix paths since I have no need to care about all the cross-platform details in this code base.) I wouldn't expect this to be something the language itself provides, and I'm not even that worried about it being missing from the standard library because it's awfully detail-oriented even for that.