Question

Go doesn’t provide assertions. They are undeniably convenient, but our experience has been that programmers use them as a crutch to avoid thinking about proper error handling and reporting.

However it has print and println which does

panic like print, aborts execution after printing
panicln like println, aborts execution after printing

Isnt that the same thing as an assert? Why would they claim the above but have panic? i can see it leading to the same problems but adding an error msg to the end of it which can easily be abused. Am i missing something?

Answer 1

No, it’s not. panic is like “write then abort”, while an assert is like “test and if it’s false, write then abort”. There’s no way they can keep you from doing an assert-like statement anyways.