Not total pain, but certainly loses in convenience to python. Deserializing large and arbitrary JSON inputs is trivial with python's `json.loads()`. Element access rules have no dark corners (as long as you don't have pickled data in there).

In contrast, Go and its `json.Unmarshal()` aren't that well suited for parsing arbitrary and/or complex inputs. However, if the expected input is well formed and can be directly mapped to a predefined datastructure, the convenience factor is pretty high.

So, from my limited experience, I would say that JSON parsing in golang is more geared towards deserialising well defined transport formats than ingesting arbitrary inputs.

I haven't used Go, but have spent a lot of time in Scala. Any statically typed language means increased pain with JSON. Static typing really has made me appreciate a well thought out JSON data model where each key in a document can have one and only one type as its value.

That said, as someone who spends a lot of time in Python as well, I can't express how much I love the deep autocompletion powers and dumb-mistake suppressing abilities of static typing.

You can unmarshall a JSON document into a map (map[string]interface{}) or implement some interface and unserialize JSON "by hand" with a method.

Go type system is flat so it's often hard to express something without being tempted to "opt-out" from its rigid type system.

The question is, is Go type system a good compromise between simplicity and expressiveness ?

I guess language design is hard, because the competition (Nim,Rust,...) also have its share of issues.

It is a bit of a pain, but I've found it to be a worthy trade-off for static typing. Finding documentation on the json struct tags was a lot more difficult than it should've been.

This article seems to address a lot of the pain points I originally had: https://eager.io/blog/go-and-json/

You don't need to parse into a struct, you can also parse it yourself from map[string]interface{} if the JSON is not predictable.

Yes, it's pain! Unless you have the struct ready for unmarshalling json. I use gojson [https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/gojson], it auto generates struct from json with a simple command.

curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/chimeracoder/gojson | gojson -name=Repository

It's different to compare the language and the stdlib.