> Is there any good reason for wanting try/catch other than being lazy?
In a hot path it’s often beneficial to not have lots of branches for error handling. Exceptions make it cheap on success (yeah, no branches!) and pretty expensive on failure (stack unwinding). It is context specific but I think that can be seen as a good reason to have try catch.
Now of course in practice people throw exceptions all the time. But in a tight, well controlled environment I can see them as being useful.
> In a hot path it’s often beneficial to not have lots of branches for error handling.
This is true but the branch isn't taken unless there's an error in Go.
Given that the Go compiler emits the equivalent of `if (__unlikely(err != nil)) {...}` and that any modern CPUs are decently good at branch prediction (especially in a hot path that repeats), I find it hard to believe that the cost would be greater than exceptions.
In a hot path it’s often beneficial to not have lots of branches for error handling. Exceptions make it cheap on success (yeah, no branches!) and pretty expensive on failure (stack unwinding). It is context specific but I think that can be seen as a good reason to have try catch.
Now of course in practice people throw exceptions all the time. But in a tight, well controlled environment I can see them as being useful.