Zero values may act as nice defaults. Programmers who care about their code, often want initial state or default state to reflect something useful. What zero value should reflect depends on context, but you get to state that once and for all, for that type. It's just one less thing off a mind when building code, although you'd want to catch any invalid usage. Ie. referencing zero value, could result in error if due to control flow, and panic() in case of programmer error. I don't think the language or library should choose for you, unless being bound by that is a very useful trade-off.