It's a nice idea but I've literally never seen it done, so I would be interested if you have examples of major libraries that do this. Abstractly it doesn't really seem to work to me in place of simple logs.

One test case here is that your library has existed for a decade and was fast, but Java removed a method that let you make it fast, but you can still run slow without that API. Java the runtime has a flag that the end use can enable to turn it back on a for a stop gap. How do you expect this to work in your model, you expect to have an onUnnecessarilySlow() callback already set up that all of your users have hooked up which is never invoked for a decade, and then once it actually happens you start calling it and expect it to do something at all sane in those systems?

Second example is all of the scenarios where you're some transitively used library for many users, it makes and callback strategy immediately not work if the person who needs to know about the situation and could take action is the application owner rather than the people writing library code which called you. It would require every library to offer these same callbacks and transitively propagate things, which would only work if it was just such a firm idiomatic pattern in some language ecosystem and I don't believe that it is in any language ecosystem.

> library has existed for a decade

>but Java removed a method that let you make it fast, but you can still run slow without that API

I’d like to see an example of that, because this is extremely hypothetical scenario. I don’t think any library is so advanced to anticipate such scenarios and write something to log. And of course Java specifically has longer cycle of deprecation and removal. :)

As for your second example, let’s say library A is smart and can detect certain issues. Library B depending on it is at higher abstraction level, so it has enough business context to react on them. I don’t think it’s necessary to propagate the problem and leak implementation details in this scenario.

Protobuf is the example I had in mind. It uses sun.misc.Unsafe which is being removed in upcoming Java releases, but it has a slow fallback path. It logs a warning when it runs if it can tell it's only using the fallback path but the fast path is still available if the application owner set a flag to turn it back on if they want to:

https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/issues/20760

Java Protobuf also logs a warning now if you can tell you are using gencode old enough that it's covered by a DoS CVE. They actually did a release that broke compatability of the CVE covered gencode but restored it and print a warning in a newer release.

What’s stopping you from using the replacements provided in VarHandle and MemorySegment? Just wanting to support the 10 year old JDK 8?

There's a lot here, to be honest these things always come back to investment cost and ROI compared to everything else that could be worked on.

Java 8 is still really popular, probably the most popular single version. It's not just servers in context, but also Android where Java 8 is the highest safe target, it's not clear what decade we'll be in when VarHandle would be safe to use there at all.

VarHandle was Java 9 but MemorySegment was Java 17. And the rest of FFM is only in 25 which is fully bleeding edge.

Protobuf may realistically try to move off of sun.misc.unsafe without the performance regressions in a way that is without adopting MemorySegment to avoid the versioning problem, but it takes significant and careful engineering time.

That said it's always possible to have waterfall of preferred implementations based on what's supported, it's just always an implementation/verification costs.

I’ve written code that followed this model, but it almost always just maps to logging anyway, and the rest of the time it’s narrow options presented in the callback. e.g. Retry vs wait vs abort.

It’s very rarely realistic that a client would code up meaningful paths for every possible failure mode in a library. These callbacks are usually reserved for expected conditions.

> almost always just maps to logging anyway

Yes, that’s the point. You log it until you encounter it for the first time, then you know more and can do something meaningful. E.g. let’s say you build an API client and library offers callback for HTTP 429. You don’t expect it to happen, so just log the errors in a generic handler in client code, but then after some business logic change you hit 429 for the first time. If library offers you control over what is going to happen next, you may decide how exactly you will retry and what happens to your state in between the attempts. If library just logs and starts retry cycle, you may get a performance hit that will be harder to fix.

Defining a callback for every situation where a library might encounter an unexpected condition and pointing them all at the logs seems like a massive waste of time.

I would much prefer a library have sane defaults, reasonable logging, and a way for me to plug in callbacks where needed. Writing On429 and a hundred other functions that just point to Logger.Log is not a good use of time.

This sub-thread in my understanding is about a special case (a non-error mode that client may want to avoid, in which case explicit callback makes sense), not about all possible unexpected errors. I’m not suggesting hooks as the best approach. And of course “on429” is the last thing I would think about when designing this. There are better ways.

If the statement is just that sometimes it’s appropriate to have callbacks, absolutely. A library that only logs in places where it really needs a callback is poorly designed.

I still don’t want to have to provide a 429 callback just to log, though. The library should log by default if the callback isn’t registered.

It doesn’t have to provide a specific callback. This can be a starting point (Java):

  var client = aClient()
   .onError((request,response) -> { 
      LOG.debug(…); 
      return FAIL; 
   }).build();

And eventually you do this:

   return switch(response.code()) {
      case 429 -> RETRY;
      default -> FAIL;
   }

Or something more interesting, e.g. with more details of retry strategy.