null VS fsm

Use-case: working on PATCH requests, the body may or may not contain nullable values. I am using guregu/null and I can't use a pointer because if the json contains "null" as a value, the pointer will be set to nil in the struct, instead of a value representing the presence of null. In short I can't differentiate the absence of the field in the request from the presence of the field with a null value.

https://github.com/guregu/null is an awesome package implementing most SQL scanner Interfaces plus JSON

There’s also this: https://github.com/guregu/null

Unfortunately in Go, switching to *bool makes the api a little more awkward to use since users that need to set true or false have to define a local variable then use a pointer to that. Another option would be something like null, but that adds a dependency to your currently-dependency-free project. If anyone has a better solution to this pattern, I'd love to hear it.

I'm reevaluating some of my practices in Go and one of them is the idea of verifying everything before usage to prevent runtime panics. For example, how do you ensure something is properly initialized before it's used? I was thinking on introducing a state machine to controllm this kind of thigs. What do you think? https://github.com/looplab/fsm