Here's a good Rob Pike quote from later on in the thread: "This is exactly the kind of thing the proposal tries to avoid. Panic and recover are not an excepti

Here's a good Rob Pike quote from later on in the thread: "This is exactly the kind of thing the proposal tries to avoid. Panic and recover are not an exception mechanism as usually defined because the usual approach, which ties exceptions to a control structure, encourages fine-grained exception handling that makes code unreadable in practice. There really is a difference between an error and what we call a panic, and we want that difference to matter. Consider Java, in which opening a file can throw an exception. In my experience few things are less exceptional than failing to open a file, and requiring me to write inside-out code to handle such a quotidian operation feels like a Procrustean imposition. Our proposal instead ties the handling to a function - a dying function - and thereby, deliberately, makes it harder to use. We want you think of panics as, well, panics! They are rare events that very few functions should ever need to think about. If you want to protect your code, one or two recover calls should do it for the whole program. If you're already worrying about discriminating different kinds of panics, you've lost sight of the ball."