In Go, the accepted way to report errors is to take advantage of multiple returns, such as:

   result, err := somePotentiallyFailingFunction()
   if err != nil {
      // Try to recover here
      ...
      // Not recoverable?
      panic()
   }

And this call to panic works the way you prefer. Note that doing the following:

   result := somePotentiallyFailingFunction()

won't compile since the number of values on the left doesn't match the right, so if a function can fail and returns an error, you will know. If you do something like:

   result, err := somePotentiallyFailingFunction()

And then never check err, it's actually a compile-time error, which enforces error checking, to a point. What's next is the kind of thing you don't like, and it's poor style.

   result, _ := somePotentiallyFailingFunction()

This assigns the error to _, which causes no errors if you don't use it.

Hope this clears some things up.