As someone quite new to Go, who has found a lot to like, I find the lack of a built in way to model optionality (besides pointers, which rather muddy the intent

As someone quite new to Go, who has found a lot to like, I find the lack of a built in way to model optionality (besides pointers, which rather muddy the intent) absolutely baffling. I want to use values over pointers for as much as I possibly can; the sort of stuff I work on is not so performance sensitive that it would be a problem. But zero-values are totally insufficient for modelling optional values, especially for numeric data. Now it has generics I could implement my own Optional[T] type, but backup from the compiler forcing me to check a value exists before doing anything with it is what really makes optional types shine in languages that have it.