Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

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".

Did you ever actually program in Rust?

In my experience, a lot of the code is dedicated to "correctly transforming between different Result / Error types".

Much more verbose than exceptions, despite most of the time pretending they're just exceptions (i.e. the `?` operator).

Why not just implement exceptions instead?

(TBH I fully expect this comment to be downvoted, then Rust to implement exceptions in 10 years... Something similar happened when I suggested generics in Go.)

I've only worked in exceptions, so I can't really comprehend the book-keeping required without them. To me it's a separation of concerns: the happy path only involves happy code. The "side channel" for the unhappy path is an exception, with an exception handler at a layer of the abstraction where it's meaningful, yet happy, code. By "happy" I mean code that's simply the direct practical work that's trying to accomplished something, so doesn't need to worry about when things go terribly wrong.

Being blind to the alternative, and mostly authoring lower level libraries, what's the benefit of not having exceptions? I understand how they're completely inappropriate for an OS, a realtime system, etc, but what about the rest? Or is that the problem: once you have the concept, you've polluted everything?