I agree this can be awkward, especially if you let these constructs propagate through your codebase and database. However, if a string or int can be null, then all strings and ints are essentially pointers, so you've just introduced this construct everywhere.

A couple things I have tried:

- hope default values align with your business logic, eg an empty string isn't a valid name and 0 isn't a valid age.

- for partial updates, populate the existing values before unmarshalling, then unmarshal on top. Missing fields in the json won't overwrite the existing values

- unmarshall into a map[string]interface{}, which gives you the semantics you want.