I think your point is fair as you can do runtime safety in Go by wrapping Panic, but that's not exactly what Panic is meant to be used for. I guess it's more of a intent vs syntax thing, aside from the part where Panic can be Recover()ed.

You're taking it out of a context of me praising Golang, however, and while I do hate the fact that they didn't just do runtime assertions, it's not like I dislike Go as a whole because of it.