You have been mislead. Better advice for panicing in Go is to panic in truly exceptional or unrecoverable circumstances. For example, a programmer error (violating the terms of a function contract) is a perfectly reasonable justification for panicing across package boundaries.
Note that this is somewhat inflated with a lot of `panic("unreachable")` calls. They are a symptom of the standard Go Compiler requiring a `return` on every code path of a function that returns at least one value. A `panic(...)` relaxes this requirement. In this case, a panic arising would indicate a bug in the package. Which is another good reason to panic across package boundaries :-)
Do you know if they intend to fix the need for phoney code paths? It seems odd that a language with nice support for first class functions and closures can't acknowledge when "if ... else ..." has complete flow coverage.
The Go standard library:
Note that this is somewhat inflated with a lot of `panic("unreachable")` calls. They are a symptom of the standard Go Compiler requiring a `return` on every code path of a function that returns at least one value. A `panic(...)` relaxes this requirement. In this case, a panic arising would indicate a bug in the package. Which is another good reason to panic across package boundaries :-)