Well, it's a matter of taste, I guess. In my opinion any downcast that reliably distinguishes between valid and invalid values is type-safe. The behaviour of
defer func() {
if e := recover(); e != nil {
fmt.Printf("not a string %v\n", e)
}
}()
v := interface{}(5)
u := v.(string)
fmt.Println(u)
is well-defined: it will print "not a string", always.
By that logic there's no such thing as a non-type-safe language, because all programs have behaviour.
Normally one would say a checked downcast like that is not type-safe, because you can't reason locally about the type behaviour of the downcast based on knowing the type of v. You would have to know the value of v, which is a Turing-complete problem in the general case.
