This isn't a situation where the choices are: 3 lines of IDE-Insert-Boilerplate, or Exceptions. I think Go could add syntax to keep its relatively unique form o

This isn't a situation where the choices are: 3 lines of IDE-Insert-Boilerplate, or Exceptions. I think Go could add syntax to keep its relatively unique form of error handling, while reducing code noise. The guard proposal is fine, but I'd prefer to see something like: func MyFunc() error { r := db.Get("12345") guard "error Get(12345)" } Syntactically really strange, but point being: if a function returns (any, ..., error); 'guard' is a keyword which eats the last 'error', optionally prefixes it with the string in that last keyword argument (standard golang error wrapping: "error Get(12345): {err.Error()}", and bubbles it up (along with zero or default values for the other arguments). It would also be nice, for more complex use-cases, if that last argument could be a mapping function as well, like: func MyFunc() CustomError { r := db.Get("12345") guard func(err error) CustomError { return CustomError{baseErr: err, code: 500} } } Though, I'd gladly settle to not have that, as it goes a little beyond the extreme syntactic simplicity I expect out of go.