This is one of the trouble spots I have with Go.

Say I have 3 members that must be set, and 5 optional members. Go's solution is to make the 3 critical members private so that someone using this struct will probably figure out they should use a construction function. And doing this means replacing all code that creates my struct with calls to a 'New' function. With all this friction, people aren't likely to do the right thing.

At least in C++ with public members I can initialize appropriately in the constructor. Of course littering my code-base with public members would be bad practice in the first place.