Go runtime: 4 years later

Re:Go runtime: 4 years later by randomdata on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @04:30AM (#32992851)

While that may look good for a hypothetical example, I'm not sure how beneficial it is in real-world use. If your higher level functions are directly passing errors from your lower level functions then you start to bake implementation details into your abstractions which becomes a nightmare later when your implementation changes and callers are depending on those details. In reality, you need to deal with the error immediately and, if there is no better option, return your own error that describes the problem in a non-implementation-specific way.

It is possible that with other error-related features added to the language you could avoid those traps, but Go doesn't feature those either, so simply adding that construct without thinking about the problem much more deeply doesn't buy you much.

If you are solving a stop the world when you encounter an error-type problem that might be okay, although I'd argue that you may as well panic instead. But, again, Go isn't designed for those problems and I'm not sure it needs to be. There are already plenty of good languages designed for that type of work.

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Re:Go runtime: 4 years later by kaba0 on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @06:13AM (#32993465)

All of these things are better handled by good old exceptions (with optional checking, even). All in all, handling errors is often not possible locally -- there is no reasonable thing to do with a db connection error for example at its immediate caller.

The reasonable thing is perhaps to log it there at most, and bubble it up (possibly wrapped as you mentioned). It can be handled for example by a request handler, by returning a 50_ error.

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Re:Go runtime: 4 years later by randomdata on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @08:57AM (#32994696)

Casting errors to exceptions (panic/recover) are considered a valid approach in Go within your application logic. Its built-in HTTP handlers will even 500 out of the box if a panic isn't recovered beforehand.

But other layers of abstraction lose their utility value if they start to make assumptions about the caller. Maybe in your web service a 50x stop the world error is all you'll ever need if there is a database error, but the next guy using the code for another purpose could have very different requirements and when you have to actually deal with errors, exceptions become a royal pain very quickly. As such, the official line is simply that you shouldn't let errors casted to exceptions cross package boundaries.

But, again, Go isn't really designed for stop the world programming and it's okay to use another tool if your problem space is suited to stopping the world.

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Re:Go runtime: 4 years later by kaba0 on Tuesday September 27, 2022 @09:40AM (#32995080)

I don’t get what you mean by stopping the world. An exception (in most languages) only interrupts the executing thread.

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