Hmm, are we talking json parsing? Yes, the field would take the zero value. If you need to differentiate between the zero-value (eg empty string, 0 for numbers) you’d typically use a pointer only for that purpose. That kinda sucks but there are some good arguments for zero-defaults too.

The unmarshal functions take a reference but they don’t need to be declared as (heap-based) pointers. You can pass a `&val` directly. It needs a reference passed in to determine the type.