You get that for free in any language that allows you to pass parameters to a query. There is nothing Go specific.

> One of my biggest complaints about ORMs is that I often know the exact query I need to write, and it is a pain to compose it with the ORM.

I agree that ORMs are often their own DSL one has to learn, when SQL is already there. In that sense they are opaque. Yet ORM still deal with relationships that have to be manually wired with queries, since AFAIK SQL query are still 2 dimensional. In my opinion query builders are often a nice trade-off between a fully featured ORM and raw SQL : you get SQL abstraction thus query reuse at minimal cost without the complexity.

An other alternative is Jooq style code generation/scaffolding but each time a tool like that is added to a compilation pipeline it is yet another dependency to manage. Code generation is opaque in its own ways.

Finally there is the nuclear option in shape of HQL but it sounds like a half baked farce to go back to "SQL" to avoid SQL.

I myself chose to go with query builders, in fact i'm porting Doctrine DBAL to Go as we speak.