Go has two data structure creation functions: new and make. The distinction is a common early point of confusion but seems to quickly become natural. The basic distinction is that new(T) returns a *T, a pointer that Go programs can dereference implicitly, while make(T, args) returns an ordinary T, not a pointer. Often that T has inside it some implicit pointers. New returns a pointer to zeroed memory, while make returns a complex structure.
There is a way to unify these two, but it would be a significant break from the C and C++ tradition: define make(*T) to return a pointer to a newly allocated T, so that the current new(Point) would be written make(*Point). We tried this for a few days but decided it was too different from what people expected of an allocation function.