This article was originally published on gopheradvent.com Looking in Go’s mirror: How and when to use reflect Go’s static typing is a headline feature of the language. It prevents whole classes of bugs, makes code easier to navigate and refactor, and makes it easier for linters to analyze. But there are times when it’s very constricting. What if we’re reading JSON files from disk with unknown structure? We can’t define a type ahead of time that will cover all cases.