Error handling in Go is one of the language's most controversial topics. It ranks high in each Go Developer Survey and many different people have proposed many different solutions to the perceived problems. The Go Team's stance on error handling as a problem in need of a fix has changed recently, with a declaration that no proposals will be accepted for changes to Go's error handling syntax. In this episode, Kris is joined by Ian and Matt to discuss this news. They talk about whether error handling has ever actually been a problem, what the Go team actually is, and the benefits of deciding not to provided syntactic support for error handling.

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Notes:

• [ On | No ] syntactic support for error handling
• #71203 proposal: spec: reduce error handling boilerplate using ?
• #71460 discussion: spec: reduce error handling boilerplate using ?
• Go Wiki: SliceTricks
• slices package
• maps package
• skriptble's Bluesky post on AI hype
• #19623 proposal: spec: change int to be arbitrary precision

Table of Contents:

• Prologue (02:32)
• Chapter 1: It's Fine. (04:03)
• Chapter 2: But What Are Errors? (09:19)
• Chapter 3: Who's Responsible For Solving Problems? (26:53)
• Chapter 4: We Should Panic (38:24)
• Chapter 5: Go Is A Low Level Language (41:32) [Supporter Only]
• Chapter 6: What Is The Go Team? (41:56)
• Chapter 7: What's Next for Go? (50:41)
• Chapter 8: Boundaries & Backpressure (59:08)
• Appendix UNPOP: Unpopular Proposals (59:39) [Supporter Only]
• Appendix WASM: The New FFI (59:43)
• Epilogue (01:05:36)

Hosts

• Website
• Bluesky
• Threads
• X/Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram

• (02:32) - Prologue