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I am new to Go. What I noticed was that most online resources handle errors using if err != nil. However, there are some cases where doing the reverse would actually reduce nesting ie. if err == nil { return something, nil }

for instance something like the following

however, couldn't this be simplified to the following:

Is it incorrect to do this? If not, what would be the reasons against it?

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Both snippets produce identical results, and there's not necessarily a "right" or "wrong" here.

It is, however, strongly advisable to pick one style and stick with it. Consistency is key.

Most Go code I've seen strives to use indented blocks for error handling - typically through early exits. The happy path is generally not indented or inside (nested) control structures.

So - most developers would expect this:

instead of:

This is very convenient: when reading code, it feels like you're reading a story. You get used to the fact that indented code is typically an alternative flow/path.

Finally - when there's 9 occurrences of err != nil, it's fair to assume the odds of you distinguishing the err == nil on the tenth occurrence are pretty slim.

A very related blog post that describes this problem can be found here.

In special cases, when the check is the last thing in a function, this might be OK, but I am generally against doing this, because: