alt Hacker NewsEvery time I hear complaints about error handling, I wonder if people have next to no try catch blocks or if they just do magic to hide that detail away in other languages? Because I still have to do error handling in other languages roughly the same? Am I missing something?
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thunky • yesterday at 11:12 PM
Lots of non-go code out there on the Internet if you ever decide you want to take a look.
politician • yesterday at 10:54 PM
You’re not missing anything. I’ve worked with many developers that are clueless about error handling; who treat it as a mostly optional side quest. It’s not surprising that folks sees the explicit error handling in Go as a grotesque interruption of the happy path.
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Exceptions travel up the stack on their own. Given that most error cases can't be handled immediately locally (otherwise it would be handled already and not return an error), but higher up (e.g. a web server deciding to return an error code) exceptions will save you a lot of boilerplate, you only have the throw at the source and the catch at the handler.
Meanwhile Go will have some boilerplate at every single level
Errors as values can be made ergonomic, there is the FP-heavy monadic solution with `do`, or just some macro like Rust. Go has none of these.