Table of Contents

Overview

Let’s understand what happens when panic happens in a program. Imagine a function call from main function to f1 function to f2 function

main->f1->f2

Now let’s say that panic happens in function f2 then below will be the sequence of events that will be happening

Execution of f2 will stop. Defer functions in f2 will be executed if present. Control will return to the caller which is a function f1.

f1 function will behave in a similar way as if panic happened in that function and after that call will return to the caller which is main function. Note that if there are more functions in between then the process will continue up the stack in a similar way

main function will also behave as if pannic happened in that function and after that, the program will crash

Once the program crashes, it will print the panic message along with this stack trace

Program

Let’s see a program for that

package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
    f1()
}
func f1() {
    defer fmt.Println("Defer in f1")
    f2()
    fmt.Println("After painc in f1")
}
func f2() {
    defer fmt.Println("Defer in f2")
    panic("Panic Demo")
    fmt.Println("After painc in f2")
}

Output

Defer in f2
Defer in f1
panic: Panic Demo

goroutine 1 [running]:
main.f2()
        main.go:17 +0x95
main.f1()
        main.go:11 +0x96
main.main()
        main.go:6 +0x20
exit status 2

In the above program, panic happened in the f2 function like below

panic("Panic Demo")

the defer function in f2 is called after that and it prints the below message

Defer in f2

Notice that as soon as the panic happens in the f2 function, its execution stops therefore below line if f2 never gets executed

fmt.Println("After painc in f2")

Control returns to f1 and it it has a defer function. The defer gets executed and it prints the below message

Defer in f1

Control returns to main function after that and then the program crashes.The output prints the panic message along with the entire stack trace from main to f1 to f2.

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