I'm pretty sure you've misunderstood. Did you read the code I linked you to? Look at how it handles errors internally. Go's standard JSON decoder isn't going to

I'm pretty sure you've misunderstood. Did you read the code I linked you to? Look at how it handles errors internally. Go's standard JSON decoder isn't going to crash your program if it fails to parse JSON---that would be disastrous. It exposes regular errors to the user. But internally, it uses panic/recover because it elides a lot of manual error checking.