What type of error handling does go use?

In Go, errors are represented by the built-in error type, which is an interface type with a single method Error() string. This method returns a string representation of the error message. By convention, functions that can produce errors will return an error as their last return value.

Go's error handling mechanism encourages programmers to return explicit error values rather than relying on exceptions or panics. This means that error handling is done explicitly by the programmer and makes it easier to reason about the control flow of the program.

One common pattern is to return an error and a value from a function. For example:

func divide(a, b float64) (float64, error) {
    if b == 0 {
        return 0, fmt.Errorf("division by zero")
    }
    return a / b, nil
}

result, err := divide(10, 2)
if err != nil {
    fmt.Println("Error:", err)
} else {
    fmt.Println("Result:", result)
}

In this example, the **divide** function returns both the quotient and an error if the divisor is zero. The caller can check if there was an error by testing if the error is nil, which indicates success.

Go also provides the **panic** and **recover** functions for handling exceptional situations, but these should be used sparingly and only for situations that truly cannot be handled through normal error handling mechanisms.