Re:I want off Mr. Golang’s Wild Ride (2020)
by kaba0 on Thursday April 28, 2022 @03:01PM
(#31196775)
Checked exceptions are a thing. Java’s implementation is unfortunately not perfect, but exceptions themselves are analogous to basically Rust’s Result type, but it has in-built support on a language level which packs the stack trace into the error case and auto-bubbles up if not handled.
I believe a language where instead of subtypes you would get algebraic data types and could optionally mark whether a given exception is checked or not would be the ideal solution.
Re:I want off Mr. Golang’s Wild Ride (2020)
by mcronce on Thursday April 28, 2022 @03:37PM
(#31197208)
> auto-bubbles up if not handled
I'm guessing you already know this, but for anybody else reading - this isn't entirely accurate; Result::Err doesn't auto bubble up like an exception, you have to manually bubble it up. The "special sauce" comes from (A) the compiler forcing you to notice this and do something about it, and (B) the `?` syntactic sugar to make that super easy.
It does occur to me as I'm typing this that you might be talking about panics, though, in which case yeah that's entirely accurate.
>
> This is based on?
By explicitly annotating functions as fallible the language hints to the programmer that errors need to be accounted for.
With exceptions, the hints only appear at runtime - when your program crashes. There's nothing that nudges you towards handling errors at the point of writing code, so you end up with brittle software.