That's because single error instances are much cheaper than always creating a new instance of a given type. No need to create garbage for lots of common errors.

That's because single error instances are much cheaper than always creating a new instance of a given type. No need to create garbage for lots of common errors. Of course you could have a dedicated type plus a singleton implementation of it in Go. But what would be the advantage? Checking if err.(type) == io.EofType does not give you more information the only checking if err == io.Eof, as long as you don't store any error instance related information in it. Which makes sense for custom errors and which Go absolutely allows you to do.