out of bounds panics aren’t all that common in practice. Yeah they’re easy to write, but usually if you have a slice you’re going to range over the whole thing

out of bounds panics aren’t all that common in practice. Yeah they’re easy to write, but usually if you have a slice you’re going to range over the whole thing or loop over it up to its length anyway. It’s not common to handle slice indexes on their own and keep them hanging around outside of the context of a for loop. The major exception to this is cases where you want the first element of a slice and didn’t check that the slice is non-empty first, which sucks. But in any case, it doesn’t come up all that often in production code. You can range over a nil slice or a slice of zero items safely. Nil pointer dereferences are way more common, as is assignment into a nil map. Those I see coming up a lot in newer Go programmers’ code.