[redbad]

defer and recover have nothing to do with each other, except that in the few circumstances where it's appropriate to use recover, you often do it within a defer block.

    > are you saying that you don't need to handle exceptions 
    > (whether using defer or recover)

Go doesn't have exceptions. You don't need to handle (i.e. explicitly deal with) panics via recover. If you do, especially if you're not making the panics yourself in e.g. a parsing package, that's a bad code smell and you're probably doing something wrong.