The tl;dr boils down to a combination of valuing both compilation speed and execution speed.
A goroutine that has to be killed (no other way to tell it to stop) is a bug.
(Having the go statement return a handle that you can block on would of course be completely fine, but at this point they're probably not going to do that either.)
I have run both Go and Python backends in production for years. There is an entire class of bugs present in Python services (missing error handling) that simply does not happen in my Go services.
Python puts the burden of knowing what exception types a function call will raise on the caller, in Go I just check for err. Even if I do not anticipate every failure mode the Go call will raise, I will always log the error and handle it in a controlled manner. I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve encountered an unhandled exception in my Python code, and often in such a case the logging will be lacklustre because you will just see a huge stack trace, but lose the contextual logging I would have automatically added in Go.
Perhaps a syntactic sugar is in order to reduce verbosity.
I try to avoid exceptions, is there any better ways? (Variant looks a bit more complicated but could be a totally OK alternative)
The original Go team was trying to avoid this:
"Java, JavaScript (ECMAScript), Typescript, C#, C++, Hack (PHP), and more [...] actively borrow features from one another. They are converging into a single huge language." [0]
That team has since moved on, and now Go has begun to join that convergence.
The problem is that most programmers seem to want to write Java, more-or-less. New, simpler languages come along, but once they get popular, the pressure is on to turn them into Java-likes. It happened to Python and now it’s happening to Go. It takes a strong will for language maintainers to say “no”, and their language will suffer in popularity as a result - see, for example, Ruby.
[0] https://go.dev/talks/2015/simplicity-is-complicated.slide#5
You can have more complex languages like Scala that provide stronger modeling ability, but at the cost of complexity. Golang started off as extremely naive/simplistic, and is now converging in some ways. But it still has a ways to go: no generics on interfaces, no unions/ADTs, no pattern matching, no proper enums, error handling leaves much to be desired, and much more.