Libraries like Jooq and SQLDelight include what I'm talking about and then build on top of it with codegen which is even nicer since it adds compiler safety

But even without codegen you'd still a much nicer interface than manually hacking together strings as the Golang example others have linked shows: https://github.com/Masterminds/squirrel

I never use string concat to generate SQL in Go - isn’t it normal to use placeholders? ie,

    db.QueryRow(“select $1”, n)

Looking at squirrel, I really don’t see how this

    sql, args, err := sq.Insert("users").Columns("name", "age").
    Values("moe", 13).Values("larry", sq.Expr("? + 5", 12)).
    ToSql()

Is better than this

    sql == "INSERT INTO users (name,age) VALUES (?,?),(?,? + 5)"

That said, I will happily agree that that SQL statement composition is not the same as an ORM, and I can see the benefit of Squirrel for those rare times you do need to conditionally build SQL statements.