[marcus_holmes]

I stopped, because it conflicts so badly with the Go conventions, and because I found myself handling more errors when I didn't use panic.

I think this is one of those things that new Gophers find hard to adjust to, and older ones realise the wisdom of (there's a few of these in the Go learning journey!).

I'm not impugning your expertise or implying that you're inexperienced. It's just something I've noticed.

[akvadrako]

For me it was the other direction. I started using err returns because I knew it was idiomatic, but after doing that for months and seeing no benefit I decided it was just idiotic to continue.

When I want to handle an error case locally I still use them, but that's extremely rare.