Don't forget about the tooling: unit testing, benchmarking, generated documentation, code formatting, and emacs+vim plugins are included in the official package

Don't forget about the tooling: unit testing, benchmarking, generated documentation, code formatting, and emacs+vim plugins are included in the official package. I think these are often overlooked when describing its benefits. You can jump in and start working right away. In discussions about error handling in Go, I rarely see mention of panic used for private exception handling. If a module exposes a small surface area, the public entry points can recover from panics and return them as errors. Private functions can then use panic to report errors: func PublicEntryPoint(input string) (output []byte, err error) { defer func() { if e := recover(); e != nil { output = nil err = e } }() err = nil output = privateFunc(input) // no need to check for error here return } func privateFunc(input string) []byte { foo := otherPrivateFunc(...) // no need to check for error here // ... } func otherPrivateFunc() int { // ... panic(fmt.Errorf("Something is wrong")) } I would panic-recover a specific type of error instead of the generic "error" type, but I'm simplifying for the example. Also, it is not recommended to panic across module boundaries.