A memory allocation failure is unexpected, and more down to the OS than the application itself; that's where a panic is in order and a last moment "something serious has happened".
In theory, Java's exception handling is supposed to do the same; checked exceptions for expected errors, unchecked for left-field things.
Anyway that aside, Go's error handling could be better because unlike e.g. the Either pattern, you're not actually required to handle errors and using _ you can easily ignore them. Second, the code style and conventions seem to tell you to just re-use an `err` variable if there's multiple errors that can occur in a function (common in e.g. file handling), which opens up the way for accidentally not checking and handling an error.
