Go has "panic", which does as you suggest and propagates up the stack to something that can "recover". If nothing can, it will crash the program. Its use is gen

Go has "panic", which does as you suggest and propagates up the stack to something that can "recover". If nothing can, it will crash the program. Its use is generally reserved for truly exceptional circumstances. Most errors are handled quite like the way you propose, e.g. handle, err := Open(). You can ignore the error if you wish, but that's up to you, and it's explicit that you're ignoring it: handle, _ := Open(). Panics are not meant to be a way to control the flow of the program, but rather to regain control of it if something disastrous occurs.