I understand pointers and structs just fine, it's just that you would think a modern language like Go would avoid use of pointers to structs and "bring-your-own

I understand pointers and structs just fine, it's just that you would think a modern language like Go would avoid use of pointers to structs and "bring-your-own-buffer" type calling conventions except wherever possible. It makes for ugly developer APIs, in my opinion. That is, in a "friendly" language I expect to generate JSON like this (in pseudocode): HashMap parsed = JSON::parse("{1: 2}"); not JSONObj obj; JSON::populate(&obj, "{1: 2}");