[kyrra]

I was partially incorrect. I said "reflection" could look it up, but you can check it during the conversion as you said (from Effective Go[0]). But my original point (before the edit) still holds true. You need to convert any data stored in a common data structure implementations and you don't easily know its type. So you have to track the type of the data in that structure yourself. So if you pass around a tree, linked list, or whatever, it's not clear what the type is of the stored data by the type information.

But you are right, I'm new enough to Go to forget about the 'ok' check on the type conversion. Checking errors on any unsafe operations is really the best way to go. If you are unsure of the type of a structure you are getting, you really should be checking it.

[0] http://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#interface_conversion...