[int_19h]

They're essentially the same, in a sense that if/goto is essentially the same as a loop. In practice, there's a big pragmatic difference.

And I have to say, the debate around Go error handling does remind me a fair bit of some of the arguments I've read while researching that ancient debate about structured programming - needless abstraction that we're not even sure is right, it's clearer when it's explicit, language is simpler etc.

[apta]

golang just brought these arguments back, and they're ending up reinventing most of what's been done, but in a subpar way (e.g. code gen instead of generics, verbose error handling + panics instead of exceptions, etc.).

[int_19h]

FWIW I don't think panics are a bad idea necessarily, they're just very different from errors. Errors are part of the API contract (whether enforced by the language or not). Panics are for when the contract is broken on either side, or expected invariants suddenly don't hold - the reason being that if your basic guarantees about process state are broken, you can't really guarantee that you'll be able to handle the error either, and trying to do so regardless might result in a security issue.

This distinction is growing popular in general, including languages that have exceptions (e.g. FailFast in C#) and error types (e.g. panic in Rust).