Wow, good catch!

You have to know why the rules are needed in the first place to dedicate a big chunk of your adult life to making and maintaining a language that discourages breaking them, I suppose. It’s certainly an elegant api from the caller’s perspective, I’d just hate to have to maintain it.

The code being so complex as to have been written by the foremost authority on how to use the language to its maximum extent is another data point, though. Perhaps the KISS of Go is more of a cultural artifact of its corporate roots, though I like to think the explicit rejection of memory management, inheritance, exceptions, and macros (from pre-1.0) says otherwise.