Go is not a great language to write parsers in IMO, it just doesn't have anything that makes such a task nice. That being said, people seem to really dislike Go here, which is fine, but somewhat surprising. Go is extremely simple. If you take a look at it's creators pedigree, that should make a ton of sense: they want you to make small, focused utilities and systems that use message passing (typically via a network) as the primary means of scaling complexity. What I find odd about this is that it was originally intended as a C++ replacement.