[deergomoo]

Using pointers feels horrible as a workaround though because it completely muddies the intent. Is it a pointer because it could be zero or <not set>, is it a pointer for performance reasons, is it a pointer because the function mutates it? To me it flies directly in the face of Go's desire to keep things simple and easy to reason about.

> You’d be surprised how infrequently that’s actually a concern though

I admittedly don't write a huge amount of Go, but I run into this fairly often any time I'm dealing with user input. Something like an optional numeric input is not at all uncommon.