It seems after much resistance to the idea, Go has added exception handling to the language in the form of defer, panic, and recover.

The Go Programming Language Blog: Defer, Panic, and Recover.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the’ve got something here.  Defer gives you the equivalent of C#’s finally/using; or a nice subset of C++’s destructors; or Lisp’s unwind-protect.  Panic = throw / raise.  Recover = catch.

The blog post gives the impression that you can’t programmatically access the value passed to panic — “recover returns nil” — but before judging that behavior I should try to confirm it in the Go documentation.

All in all, I’m giving this design a thumbs up. No element of it is new, but they seem to have brought exception handling in without compromising their mantra of practical and simple.