They're not meant to be used like that (and terminate the function, not the block), so the implementation can have more overhead than try/catch. What bothers me about it is that there's no syntax for it: recover as it is looks like a dirty hack.

I've been writing my first production software in go this year, and I must say I'm quite favorable towards its error handling now, ugly as it may look. Even during testing there haven't been any crashes except in the places where you can expect them (like writing x := y.(string) when y isn't a string).

For me, the only real downside in go: nil pointers in combination with the absence of non-nullable types.