使用panic替换golang错误代码以进行所有错误处理

Question

We have medium sized application written in go. From all the code lines about 60 percent goes to code error handling. Something like this:

if err != nil {
   return err
}

After some time, writing this lines over and over again becomes tiresome and we are now thinking to replace all error codes with panics.

I know panics aren't meant to be used like that.

What can be potential pitfall and does anyone have experience with something similar ?

Answer 1

The main pitfall would be a widespread use of hammers to drive screws. Panic is for unrecoverable/unexpected errors, error return values are for recoverable/expected errors.

Replace the word "panic" with "crash", because that is conceptually what a panic is. Do you honestly want to write an application that by design crashes whenever anything goes in any way remotely wrong? That would be the most fragile application on Earth, the very antithesis of fault tolerance.