100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

7 Error management

This chapter covers

• Understanding when to panic
• Knowing when to wrap an error
• Comparing error types and error values efficiently since Go 1.13
• Handling errors idiomatically
• Understanding how to ignore an error
• Handling errors in defer calls

Error management is a fundamental aspect of building robust and observable applications, and it should be as important as any other part of a codebase. In Go, error management doesn’t rely on the traditional try/catch mechanism as most programming languages do. Instead, errors are returned as normal return values.

This chapter will cover the most common mistakes related to errors.

7.1 #48: Panicking

It’s pretty common for Go newcomers to be somewhat confused about error handling. In Go, ...