Golang is not comparable, as you get to leave failures not handled explicitly because its goto-fail scheme. I mean, that's a very nice feature of Go, but not comparable.

The danger with early returns is failure to handle all cleanup. This is really a failure of many programming languages. Golang gets this right. But even so, I'd rather have early returns (or early goto-fails) than ever deeper if/else ladders.

Another option that works very well is this:

    ret = thing1(...);
    if (ret == 0)
        ret = thing2(...);
    if (ret == 0)
        ret = thing3(...);
    if (ret)
        <handle failure>;
    return ret;