[unbrice]

One technical challenge to using panic to represent normal exceptions is that most go code is then not exception safe. This was a design choice for the ecosystem if not the language itself (see eg: Effective go about panic not crossing package boundaries, or Google's style guide).

Within a package it can work, but then you'll find language support lacking. For example defer is scoped to a function so you need to write pretty unusual code to make the equivalent of a try block.