Unless edited, I don't think that's what GP said. Panics are the way to get stacktraces, not the way to routinely handle errors. Your top level comment about 4

Unless edited, I don't think that's what GP said. Panics are the way to get stacktraces, not the way to routinely handle errors. Your top level comment about 403 errors made me assume you did not know about panic. Obviously your particular situation may have prevented it but I've always built Go programs from source (not linking binaries) which means I could always panic whenever I needed a stack trace.