No, the advantage of having an interface is everything can return an error I can typeswitch on. Unfortunately, you can't (in a backwards compatible way) change

No, the advantage of having an interface is everything can return an error I can typeswitch on. Unfortunately, you can't (in a backwards compatible way) change io.EOF or any of the other 'constant' errors because there's so much code doing 'if err != io.EOF' which now breaks. In addition, it's backwards incompatible due to anyone doing 'reflect.TypeOf' which I guess you could argue is fine to break. Speaking of reflection, there's a metric TON of runtime panics in the reflect package. Hell, I'm not sure there's a method in there that can't panic. No doubt, however, you'll say that's cheating and the expected behavior of that package, so how about NewTimer (playground https://play.golang.org/p/jDKniK3aqa https://play.golang.org/p/jDKniK3aqa ). It does not give me an opportunity to recover from bad input by passing an error out, it just panics. It is also not documented that it panics afaik and other functions in time (time.Sleep) take negative durations and handle them just fine. This is definitely inconsistent with other std library functions that can take bad input and return errors. I also think it's disingenuous to say "Keep in mind errors are from C and at least they're better than C"... the comment I'm responding to is a comment regarding go std library being one of the most consistent (implicit compared to ANY LANGUAGE) so I may bring in anything I wish, and sure Go's errors are a step up from C, but they're awful compared to other languages. They're basically passing around strings with no builtin way to create a trace of errors to return up the stack to maybe be printed, no default way to create an optional type with an error value, and no consistent way to determine which of N errors it was that was returned from a function without using a regexp 90% of the time because that damned fmt.Errorf / errors.New... And yes, using a Regexp in your error handling IS a problem. > defined on float64, which can be annoying, but is far better than any alternative Funnily enough, the 'rand' library implements everything by just having multiple functions and postfixing them with types (rand.Uint32, rand.Int, rand.Float32) and strconv does something vaguely similar. Whether one or the other is better, that's another inconsistency in the stdlibrary; do you have many functions per type or only one function for one type? I have no clue how Go could have abused you such that you are able to conceive of not having a builtin int64 compatible 'min' function as a good thing. Actually, perhaps your post is simply a plea for help as Go has tied you up and holds a gun to your head, in which case I suppose we should mount a rescue mission forthwith! Just let me write a quick timer to keep track of our progress... -1 you s.. err panic