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Go can abort at any point as well. Also, ignoring an error condition (by either forgetting about it, or simply doing the nice and tidy if err dance with no rea

by gf000 2y ago

Go can abort at any point as well. Also, ignoring an error condition (by either forgetting about it, or simply doing the nice and tidy if err dance with no real error handling in place, just a log or whatever) is much worse and can lead to silent data corruption.

Mawr 2y ago
You can abort via panic(), but that is expected to crash the application, which is perfectly fine. It's the act of attempting to catch the abort that is fraught with problems. While in Go that is rare, in languages with exceptions it's normal and expected. Ignoring an error condition is possible in Go, but so unlikely that it's not practical to worry about it. As an aside, not that it matters, but logging an error is one of the valid ways of handling it, depending on context.
- gf000 2y ago
  Logging can be a valid handling of error. I just don't believe that most errors can be handled locally so besides returning an error (bubbling up), not much can be done. Go makes this part of the happy path, so neither can be easily seen/reasoned about anymore. Exceptions do auto bubbling up, while languages with ADTs have more strictness than go, and often have some syntactic sugar/macro to help with the common case of returning the error (rust's ?).
  - kgeist 2y ago
    >I just don't believe that most errors can be handled locally so besides returning an error Sure, but explicit error handling reminds you that the call may fail, and you may want to handle it in some way (or not - then you bubble it up). With exceptions, it creates the illusion of a simple linear flow.
kgeist 2y ago
>ignoring an error condition (by either forgetting about it We rely on linters to catch that, which is pretty easy to implement (no expensive intra-procedural analysis needed, which is the case with exceptions). >Go can abort at any point as well. Panics, unlike errors, are exceptional situations which generally should not be caught (a programming error, like index out of range). They're usually much rarer than errors.
- gf000 2y ago
  Linters can't know if a case has been properly handled or not. Just because it logs something it may or may not be the proper semantic way to handle that error.

by gf000 2y ago

Mawr 2y ago

You can abort via panic(), but that is expected to crash the application, which is perfectly fine. It's the act of attempting to catch the abort that is fraught with problems. While in Go that is rare, in languages with exceptions it's normal and expected. Ignoring an error condition is possible in Go, but so unlikely that it's not practical to worry about it. As an aside, not that it matters, but logging an error is one of the valid ways of handling it, depending on context.

gf000 2y ago
Logging can be a valid handling of error. I just don't believe that most errors can be handled locally so besides returning an error (bubbling up), not much can be done. Go makes this part of the happy path, so neither can be easily seen/reasoned about anymore. Exceptions do auto bubbling up, while languages with ADTs have more strictness than go, and often have some syntactic sugar/macro to help with the common case of returning the error (rust's ?).
- kgeist 2y ago
  >I just don't believe that most errors can be handled locally so besides returning an error Sure, but explicit error handling reminds you that the call may fail, and you may want to handle it in some way (or not - then you bubble it up). With exceptions, it creates the illusion of a simple linear flow.

kgeist 2y ago

>ignoring an error condition (by either forgetting about it We rely on linters to catch that, which is pretty easy to implement (no expensive intra-procedural analysis needed, which is the case with exceptions). >Go can abort at any point as well. Panics, unlike errors, are exceptional situations which generally should not be caught (a programming error, like index out of range). They're usually much rarer than errors.

gf000 2y ago
Linters can't know if a case has been properly handled or not. Just because it logs something it may or may not be the proper semantic way to handle that error.