No matter how Go solves the issue (assuming it ever does), that will be part of it: unless it goes through a revolution and strips out and forgets about ubiquitous default values (which I don't think it will, C# has barely just dipped its toes into that pool) any sort of sum-type-like construct will need a default value. And I'm not sure `nil` (a clearly corrupted / missing value) is any worse than picking an actual valid value the way non-pointer types do.