[peterohler]

My experience is quite a bit different. Of course the examples I would use are more like what you might expect in real code. The comparison should be against code that calls a function that either returns and error and checks that error or one that panics and recovers. The overhead of returning the extra error and then the conditional used to check that error is more than a panic on error and recovery somewhere up the stack. This was not true in the early days of go but it is true today.

It really depends on the code being written. Try one approach then the other and see if it works better in your situation. For the example in the article there is really no need for an error check in the idiomatic case so why compare that to using panic. If there was an error to check the result would be much different.