3 years ago

One of the first concepts new developers learn is the if/else statement. However, complex and nested if/else statements can quickly become a cognitive burden and compromise the readability of a program. Guard Clauses leverage the ability to return early from a function (or continue through a loop) to make nested conditionals one-dimensional. Instead of using if/else chains, we simply return early from the function at the end of each conditional block: Error handling in Go naturally encourages developers to make use of guard clauses.

Let’s take a look at an exaggerated example of nested conditional logic: Could be written with guard clauses instead: The example above is much easier to read and understand.