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0 pointsquotemstr4mo ago0 comments

If the error had been an exception instead of a result, could have bubbled up

I have been saying for years that Rust botched error handling in unfixable ways. I will go to the grave believing Rust fumbled.

The design of the Rust language encourages people to use unwrap() to turn foreseeable runtime problems into fatal errors. It's the path of least resistance, so people will take it.

Rust encourages developers to consider only the happy path. No wonder it's popular among people who've never had to deal with failure.

All of the concomitant complexity--- Result, ?, the test thing, anyhow, the inability for stdlib to report allocation failure --- is downstream of a fashion statement against exceptions Rust cargo-culted from Go.

The funniest part is that Rust does have exceptions. It just calls them panics. So Rust code has to deal with the ergonomic footgun of Result but pays anyway for the possibility of exceptions. (Sure, you can compile with panic=abort. You can't count on it.)

I could not be more certain that Rust should have been a language with exceptions, not Result, and that error objects are a gross antipattern we'll regret for decades.

0 comments

Veliladon4mo ago

Errors work just like exceptions especially if you use the ? operator and let the error bubble up the chain. This is the Rust equivalent of an unhandled exception and the ripcord being pulled.

quotemstrOP4mo ago

In C++, functions are error-colored by default. You write "noexcept" if you want your function to be infallible-colored instead.

(You usually want to make a function infallible if you're using your noexcept function as part of a cleanup path or part of a container interface that allows for more optimizations of it knows certain container operations are infallible.)

Rust makes infallibility the syntactic default and makes you write Result to indicate fallibility. People often don't want to color their functions this way. Guess what happens when a programmer is six levels deep in infallible-colored function calls and does something that can fail.

.unwrap()

Guess what, in Rust, is fallible?

Mutex acquire.

Guess what you need to do often on infallible cleanup paths?

Mutex acquire.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsquotemstr4mo ago0 comments

If the error had been an exception instead of a result, could have bubbled up

I have been saying for years that Rust botched error handling in unfixable ways. I will go to the grave believing Rust fumbled.

The design of the Rust language encourages people to use unwrap() to turn foreseeable runtime problems into fatal errors. It's the path of least resistance, so people will take it.

Rust encourages developers to consider only the happy path. No wonder it's popular among people who've never had to deal with failure.

I could not be more certain that Rust should have been a language with exceptions, not Result, and that error objects are a gross antipattern we'll regret for decades.

0 comments

Veliladon4mo ago

Errors work just like exceptions especially if you use the ? operator and let the error bubble up the chain. This is the Rust equivalent of an unhandled exception and the ripcord being pulled.

quotemstrOP4mo ago

In C++, functions are error-colored by default. You write "noexcept" if you want your function to be infallible-colored instead.

.unwrap()

Guess what, in Rust, is fallible?

Mutex acquire.

Guess what you need to do often on infallible cleanup paths?

Mutex acquire.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse