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Why I Prefer Exceptions to Error Values (cedardb.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I mean, yeah, if your language does not support error values, do not use them.

Nonsense. If adopting info of the many libraries already available is not for you, it's trivial to roll your own result type.

Even if that was somehow unexplainably not an option, even the laziest of developers can write a function to return a std::tuple or a std::pair and use structured binding.

[–] marcos 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The problem is not encoding the result.

The problem is that you need some support from the language to make it easy to deal with. Otherwise you'll get into go-style infinite if (err != null) handlers that will make your code unreadable.

[+] [email protected] -6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The problem is that you need some support from the language to make it easy to deal with.

Nonsense.

if (result.isSuccess()) {
    do_something(result.value);
}
else {
   handle_error(result error);
}

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I feel like this will have zero protection against

if (result.isSuccess()) {
    handle_error(result.error);
} else {
    do_something(result.value);
}

Besides, this is exactly what the comment said about having to constantly check for return values at call site. I think this may be mitigated by some clever macro-magic, but that will become a mess fast.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 months ago

I feel like this will have zero protection against

Zero protections against what? Against the programmer telling the program to do something it shouldn't? Not programming language does that. If you resort to this sort of convoluted reasoning, the same hypothetical programmer can also swallow all exceptions.

The main problem you're creating for yourself is that you've been given an open-ended problem but instead prefer to not look for solutions.