in my experience that's partly true (it's a judgement call and lies on a spectrum). Like a HTTP server should handle panics in handler code so as to not crash t

in my experience that's partly true (it's a judgement call and lies on a spectrum). Like a HTTP server should handle panics in handler code so as to not crash the other go routines handling requests. Or maybe a long running queue worker (eg reading off SQS) should recover from a single go routine handling a message (assuming it can recover and handle the next message successfully). But it'd be way out of scope to put a recover block outside every function call just incase it did a runtime error: index out of range [1] with length . In this way its much different than try catch in languages that explicitly call out what they throw