Have a look at some of the bugs related to struct tags (420 open ones) - they can control marshalling and have lots of little directives in them like omitempty,

Have a look at some of the bugs related to struct tags (420 open ones) - they can control marshalling and have lots of little directives in them like omitempty,attr,-,set plus they combine too (for xml,json,asn1 etc) and you can stuff your own little language in too if you want, the possibilities are endless! They are a set of limited yet unvalidated translation DSLs stuffed into a string. https://github.com/golang/go/search?p=4&q=struct+tags&type=issues https://github.com/golang/go/search?p=4&q=struct+tags&type=i... Personally I think the language would be better without them, but it's too late now. Re build directives - the complaint is they are comments which do things and change code/compilation, the syntax I don't care about, but I do care that they've abused comments to do this. I agree, these problems are pretty trivial, I don't lose sleep over them.