Any time a low level method changes to throw a new exception, You don't do that in API-stable code, period. If you are working with API-unstable code - that's

Any time a low level method changes to throw a new exception, You don't do that in API-stable code, period. If you are working with API-unstable code - that's the point of static typing. The code won't compile because the intention is exactly to signal that something has changed. If you change the return type of a low-level Go function, you will have to modify its callers as well. Anything anywhere near the application logic just threw our top level generic exception, Bad codebase = bad. Sure. I never encountered that problem in the Java codebases I worked on at various employers. (And I'd be quite happy to complain about Java, I don't like it.) It's really not that easy to ignore errors in Go in practice... It is. The compiler will not emit a warning when you ignore the return value of a function/method. Here: fmt.Println("Hello world") I have just ignored an error. The compiler is happy. There are quite some Go packages in the wild that do not deal with errors when they need to.