June 05, 2025
Today, a new blog was published about error handling in Go and their syntactic changes. Here is the quick TLDR:
Go’s error handling—mainly the repetitive if err != nil pattern—has been a top complaint due to its verbosity. Over the years, the Go team explored several syntactic improvements:
- 2018:
check/handle— Introduced as part of the Go 2 discussion, but considered too complex. - 2019:
trybuilt-in — Simpler, auto-returning on error, but obscured control flow and was widely rejected. - 2024:
?operator — Inspired by Rust, cleaner and more intuitive, but still failed to achieve consensus. Despite intense effort and hundreds of community proposals, none of these changes gained broad support. The Go team has n…
June 05, 2025
Today, a new blog was published about error handling in Go and their syntactic changes. Here is the quick TLDR:
Go’s error handling—mainly the repetitive if err != nil pattern—has been a top complaint due to its verbosity. Over the years, the Go team explored several syntactic improvements:
- 2018:
check/handle— Introduced as part of the Go 2 discussion, but considered too complex. - 2019:
trybuilt-in — Simpler, auto-returning on error, but obscured control flow and was widely rejected. - 2024:
?operator — Inspired by Rust, cleaner and more intuitive, but still failed to achieve consensus. Despite intense effort and hundreds of community proposals, none of these changes gained broad support. The Go team has now decided to stop pursuing syntax changes for error handling.
Reasons include:
- Lack of community and internal consensus.
- Risk of splitting the community over idiomatic style.
- Current error handling, while verbose, is explicit and predictable.
- In idiomatic Go, well-structured error handling includes adding context or stack traces, making verbosity less of an issue.
Bottom line: Go will keep its current approach to error handling for the foreseeable future.
I’m a Principal Engineer at Scalefusion and Django CMS Fellow passionate about solving meaningful problems and pushing tech boundaries. I love reading, listening/playing music, appreciating/making art, and enjoying a good cup of coffee. Here are some recommendations from my current and past colleagues. You can check out my latest resume and Github profile. You can connect with me on twitter at @vinitkme or drop me an email atmail@vinitkumar.me. I hope you enjoy reading my essays.
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