alt Hacker NewsFrom a code modularization point of view, there shouldn’t really be much of a difference between programs and libraries. A program is just a library with a different calling convention. I like to structure programs such that their actual functionality could be reused as a library in another program.
This is difficult to reconcile with libraries only logging on a debug level.
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ivan_gammel • last Saturday at 6:40 PM
The main difference is that library is not aware of the context of the execution of the code, so cannot decide, whether the problem is expected, recoverable or severe.
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I see your point, but disagree on a practical level. Libraries are being used while you’re in “developer” mode, while programs are used in “user” mode (trying awkwardly to differentiate between _being_ a developer and currently developing code around that library.
Usually a program is being used by the user to accomplish something, and if logging is meaningful than either in a cli context or a server context. In both cases, errors are more often being seen by people/users than by code. Therefore printing them to logs make sense.
While a lib is being used by a program. So it has a better way to communicate problems with the caller (and exceptions, error values, choose the poison of your language). But I almost never want a library to start logging shit because it’s almost guaranteed to not follow the same conventions as I do in my program elsewhere. Return me the error and let me handle.
It’s analogous to how Go has an implicit rule of that a library should never let a panic occur outside the library. Internally, fine. But at the package boundary, you should catch panics and return them as an error. You don’t know if the caller wants the app to die because it an error in your lib!