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That is not true, though. Reading from a nil map panics, and reading from an empty map does not.

It doesn't. E.g. this prints 0:

var m map[string]int = nil fmt.Println(m["foo"])

The language spec is also pretty clear on this; https://go.dev/ref/spec#Map_types:

> A nil map is equivalent to an empty map except that no elements may be added.