[chimeracoder]

I'm not entirely sure what problem you're referring to here, but I wrote a tool to enable with mapping JSON to native Go types: https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/gojson . Basically, you specify the narrowest possible type that covers all expected (valid) inputs.

If your JSON is effectively "strongly typed" (most APIs are), this is going to be a huge win for you.

If your JSON is not, then you'll have a problem in any statically typed language (not just Go), because you need some way to reason about the type. You'll also have the same problem with dynamically typed languages as well - the main difference is that Go will never do implicit casts (I would view this as a good thing).

I've done a lot of work in Go involving JSON (that's originally why I wrote the above tool - to save myself time), and in practice, it's rare that I have to do anything more than decode, check for an error[0], and then move on.

[0] Which is something everyone should do in all languages, not just Go - once you've confirmed that there is no error, you rid yourself of a lot of possible bugs that could pop up later on in harder-to-discover places.

[drsintoma]

Very interesting! It might be exactly what I was missing. I ended up using simplejson[0] but it still felt like a workaround. I'll give yours a try next time. Thanks!

[0]https://github.com/bitly/go-simplejson