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0 pointsjandrewrogers4mo ago0 comments

This strikes me as a culture issue more than one of language.

A tenet of systems code is that every possible error must be handled explicitly and exhaustively close to the point of occurrence. It doesn’t matter if it is Rust, C, etc. Knowing how to write systems code is unrelated to knowing a systems language. Rust is a systems language but most people coming into Rust have no systems code experience and are “holding it wrong”. It has been a recurring theme I’ve seen with Rust development in a systems context.

C is pretty broken as a language but one of the things going for it is that it has a strong systems code culture surrounding it that remembers e.g. why we do all of this extra error handling work. Rust really needs systems code practice to be more strongly visible in the culture around the language.

0 comments

empath754mo ago

Unwrap _is_ explicitly handling an error at the point of occurrence. You have explicitly decided to panic, which is sometimes a valid choice. I use it (on startup only) when server configs are missing or invalid or in CLI tools when the options aren't valid. Crashing a pod on startup before it goes Ready is a valid pattern in k8s and generally won't cause an outage because the previous pod will continue working.

inferiorhuman4mo ago

  A tenet of systems code is that every possible error must be handled
  explicitly and exhaustively close to the point of occurrence.

All the more reason it doesn't really belong in examples for third party libraries.

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