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.