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Evolving the OCaml Programming Language (2025) [pdf]

(kcsrk.info)
157 points matt_d | 1 comments | 05 Sep 25 00:05 UTC | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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kubb ◴[05 Sep 25 08:19 UTC] No.45136229[source]▶
For people using OCaml, there’s one thing that kinda discourages me in it, that is exceptions as part of the API in the standard library.

Because exceptions aren’t checked, this effectively means that a language designed for type safety has as much type safety as python, because it’s very easy to forget handling something, and get runtime errors.

How do you deal with this day to day? I assume it’s impossible to just believe that all the code you pull in doesn’t use exceptions?

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1. yawaramin ◴[05 Sep 25 18:38 UTC] No.45142057[source]▶
Every mainstream language has exceptions. Everyone knows how to use exceptions. They're easy to use and get the job done. OCaml suffers no type safety issues from the use of exceptions. It also has option and result types so people who need more control flow can use those. The OCaml standard library typically uses exceptions for real exceptional conditions like eg trying to access a key that doesn't exist in a map. Even Rust has panics which are basically exceptions.

You criticized Haskell as not a great example of error handling. Well, Erlang/Elixir also have exceptions, and they are considered the industry leader in error recovery.

Exceptions are actually fine, it doesn't really take much to install handlers which take care of catching, logging, telemetry, re-raising etc. They mostly get a bad rep because of the latest fashions in the PL space.