alt Hacker NewsYep, checked exceptions are the shit. You can of course abuse them to create a monstrosity (as you can with anything), but when used responsibly I think they are by far the best error handling paradigm.
Yep, checked exceptions are the shit. You can of course abuse them to create a monstrosity (as you can with anything), but when used responsibly I think they are by far the best error handling paradigm.
I agree but I still think checked exceptions, at least in Java, need more investment syntactically.
They’re really painful with lambdas and you need to do weird things to get them to work properly; like rethrowing and catching some unchecked type. Scala has some interesting research here and describe the problem well [0].
Some other things I think that would go a long way to making checked exceptions more usable would be making try as an expression like in Scala or Kotlin. Not being an expression makes for some really awkward code or giant try blocks where you can’t tell what actually errors.
Finally we really need a way to “uncheck” them unceremoniously. This is one of the largest reasons developers have rejected them. If you can’t possibly handle something you need to write at least 5-6 lines of code to wrap and throw in a runtime exception or you see developers checking things that they can’t handle and then their callers who also can’t handle those exceptions have to deal with the ceremony of unchecking. I’d really love for some `throws unchecked` or try! syntax that would just automatically turn something into a runtime exception:
This all of course is probably a pipe dream, the OpenJdk team seems to be indefinitely stuck pouring all resources into Valhalla.[0] https://docs.scala-lang.org/scala3/reference/experimental/ca...