I see, was under the influence of Java, where almost everything is an object reference. Now how do I return an error in the case that Pop is called on an empty

I see, was under the influence of Java, where almost everything is an object reference. Now how do I return an error in the case that Pop is called on an empty buffer? I can return nil for a call on an empty buffer func (ctx *CBuf[T]) Pop() *T { but I could return any value for an error, and indicate with the second return value if the call succeeded. func (ctx *CBuf[T]) Pop() (T, bool) { I fixed the class, so now it looks as follows: https://github.com/MoserMichael/rzgrep/blob/master/src/cbuf/cbuf.go https://github.com/MoserMichael/rzgrep/blob/master/src/cbuf/... Thanks! Still, I am feeling a bit uncomfy with returning a garbage value with the the error indication, even if that counts as being more idiomatic. I keep wondering, why golang doesn't have an Optional monad in its standard library, like they do everywhere else.