There is more to the design space here than "exceptions vs 2x bloat." For example, Rust shares Go's "errors as values, no exceptions" philosophy, but has signif

There is more to the design space here than "exceptions vs 2x bloat." For example, Rust shares Go's "errors as values, no exceptions" philosophy, but has significant syntax sugar to reduce the bloat at the site where the error is handled. I'm sure there are also other spots in the design space to consider. (I do not think that this means Go (from the title) or C (from your example) is a bad language. All I mean to say is that the design space has multiple different possible designs, not just two.)