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611 points LorenDB | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.212s | source
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dvratil ◴[] No.43908097[source]
The one thing that sold me on Rust (going from C++) was that there is a single way errors are propagated: the Result type. No need to bother with exceptions, functions returning bool, functions returning 0 on success, functions returning 0 on error, functions returning -1 on error, functions returning negative errno on error, functions taking optional pointer to bool to indicate error (optionally), functions taking reference to std::error_code to set an error (and having an overload with the same name that throws an exception on error if you forget to pass the std::error_code)...I understand there's 30 years of history, but it still is annoying, that even the standard library is not consistent (or striving for consistency).

Then you top it on with `?` shortcut and the functional interface of Result and suddenly error handling becomes fun and easy to deal with, rather than just "return false" with a "TODO: figure out error handling".

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1. kccqzy ◴[] No.43908981[source]
The Result type isn't really enough for fun and easy error handling. I usually also need to reach for libraries like anyhow https://docs.rs/anyhow/latest/anyhow/. Otherwise, you still need to think about the different error types returned by different libraries.

Back at Google, it was truly an error handling nirvana because they had StatusOr which makes sure that the error type is just Status, a standardized company-wide type that stills allows significant custom errors that map to standardized error categories.