Maybe this is a subtlety of Go I'm not aware of, but at least in most languages, the issue with the explicit return value is that you must first return before y

Maybe this is a subtlety of Go I'm not aware of, but at least in most languages, the issue with the explicit return value is that you must first return before you can send the value. By being able to call into the response object, the handler is able to send to the client immediately, and then the handler writer can do other bookkeeping before exiting the handler. With a return value, work would need to be fire off asynchronously before the return value is sent.