Go’s preferred way to deal with errors is through return values, not exceptions. Go programs express error state with error values. The error type is a built-in interface:

type error interface {
    Error() string
}

Functions often return an error value, and calling code should handle errors by testing whether the error equals nil.

i, err := strconv.Atoi("42")
if err != nil {
    fmt.Printf("couldn't convert number: %v\n", err)
    return
}
fmt.Println("Converted integer:", i)

A nil error denotes success; a non-nil error denotes failure.

More commonly, we can create our own errors by importing the errors package and using it in the New function:

import (
  "errors"
)


func process(count int) error {
  if count < 1 {
    return errors.New("Invalid count")
  }
  ...
  return nil
}

There’s a common pattern in Go’s standard library of using error variables. For example, the io package has an EOF variable which is defined as:

var EOF = errors.New("EOF")

Go does have panic and recover functions. panic is like throwing an exception while recover is like catch; they are rarely used.