I find it telling that Go programming language has no constructs that make design by contract possible. panic/defer/recover aren't exactly that as defer and recover logic make it possible to ignore panic, IOW to ignore broken contract. What's needed at very least is some form of unrecoverable panic, which is assert really. Or, at best, direct language support of design by contract constructs (pre and post-conditions, implementation and class invariants). But given strong-headedness of language purists at the helm of Go ship, I give little change of any of this done.
One can implement assert-like behaviour by checking for special assert error in last defer function in panicking function and calling runtime.Breakpoint() to dump stack during recovery. To be assert-like that behaviour needs to be conditional. Of course this approach fells apart when new defer function is added after the one doing assert. Which will happen in large project exactly at the wrong time, resulting in missed bugs.
My point is that is that assert is useful in so many ways that having to dance around it may be a headache.
