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Comment by perlgeek | Hacker News Reader

There's a certain irony that the presenter quickly dismisses exception-based error handling, and then the first example handles an error by printing a message and exiting -- exactly what an unhandled exception does.

This is more than a small piece of irony with a somewhat artificial example. Often, there simply isn't very much you can do with an error. In a SaaS world, you might not be able to tell the user what wrong, in order to not disclose some private information. You can log the error, but only if the network is available, and you can only log it to disk if the disk isn't full.

And then there are cases where you could try to explain the error to the user, but the reasons are very complicated and/or require intimate knowledge of the architecture to make sense, and/or require intimate subject knowledge to understand, or even obscure legal reasons.

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I made this argument in the talk: the only problem with exception-based handling is the lack of explicitness. It's too easy to call functions without being aware of the set of possible errors. Many c++ projects disable exceptions entirely. Writing "exception safe" code is tricky and non-obvious. Functions which should be guaranteed to never fail often can throw std::bad_alloc. Try-catch syntax forces incorrect nesting.

Related: Only zig has fast errors with traces. Other languages have no traces or a high performance cost. Look up error return traces in the docs.

> Related: Only zig has fast errors with traces. Other languages have no traces or a high performance cost. Look up error return traces in the docs.

Out of curiosity, have you compared this to Rust’s backtrace mechanism? I’d be interested in the perf difference, if it’s available.

Rust's panics and their backtrackes are essentially the same as C++ exceptions.

I wasn’t actually thinking about panic, but the associated optional backtrace in Error types with Failure, for example: https://docs.rs/failure/0.1.3/failure/

Ah, I see.

Looking at the source code https://docs.rs/crate/failure/0.1.3/source/src/backtrace/int..., "failure" uses https://docs.rs/backtrace/0.3.9/backtrace/struct.Backtrace.h... which is the callstack at a single point, not a trace of how an error was propagated.

Hey. Thanks for making Zig. I’m glad it’s moving forward.

Don’t let all the negative comments get you down. It happens to every language author. (See some of the nasty comments on Elm, Clojure, Go, Jai, etc.) I, for one, am happy that all of these languages exist, even those that don’t scratch my itches.

Completely agree — Zig and it’s design philosophy is absolutely fantastic for its domin, and I’m very glad it exists.

I like Rust and other modern languages too, but Zig strikes me as just about the best possible contender for a true C/C++ replacement (due to seamless interop, and a very practical and well designed simple language core — as opposed to the complexity of something like Rust, for example).

> the only problem with exception-based handling is the lack of explicitness - It's too easy to call functions without being aware of the set of possible errors.

i.e. checked-exceptions?

yep! there was a sort of epiphany for me, the first I wrote Java, from Python, when I realized that I can be sure that my code could handle anything the callee could throw at it.

There are still plenty of exceptions that are unchecked, i.e. subtypes of RuntimeException, which do not have to be declared on the callee. As well as people who think it's a good idea to throw instances of Exception and just tack a "throws Exception" on their methods.

Right — that's a failing of Java the language; not the concept of checked exceptions. At least one problem with Java's exception model that Zig does not have is that some exceptions are "unchecked."

The 'failing' of checked exceptions comes from essentially being forced to couple the type signatures of your methods' successful results with their error results. A more explicit way to do this is with Optional/Either types, and now you don't need the checked exceptions feature nor need to get people to remember to check for a global errno or some other data convention like an empty string / null. There's a lot of boilerplate though, just like with checked exceptions.

I prefer a more decoupled/late-binding approach to error handling; so far Common Lisp does it the best I've seen.[0] The key insight CL people had was that often in the face of an error, you need help from somewhere away from your local context to figure out how to resolve it, but then for many cases, you want to return back to where the error has occurred and take the resolution path with your local context. In other languages that automatically unwind the stack to the exception handler, it's too late.

[0] http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Condition-Handling-2001.h...

Zig has system-exit, which is strictly less useful than unchecked exceptions, so Zig certainly has the same problem.

Once you have checked exceptions, you're basically as verbose as the Error monad anyway. Except that instead of properly encoding it in the function result type, you have a separate mechanism, which is kinda sorta but not quite like a type. In Java, this manifests itself in things such as it being impossible to write a higher-order function that has a signature of "takes some function F, and can throw everything that F can throw, plus some E".

Or just a compiler / IDE warning saying "X, and Y exceptions could be thrown here but are unhandled".

Then it's "checked" but catching is optional.

Yeah there are a lot of interesting things you can do if you design languages around an editor. Like complete, recursive type inference, so you don't have to annotate types on function signatures, but the editor can display them, which is very useful, or showing what exception can be thrown even if the language doesn't make it explicit. This works out great when the editor is available on the platform you need and working.

F# is a language this is a lot like this, and I've recently been unable to get the editor with these features working in Linux, and it makes it rather horrible. If you had to remote in to a server and use vim, it could be rather horrible, and so on.

If we can get something like the language server idea working, really well, on all platforms and supported by all editors, then designing languages around certain IDE assumptions would more often be a good idea I guess.

That's all very true, and it's sad that we haven't explored this space more.

It's a nice in-between something like a Smalltalk image-environment-IDE / Lisp Machine and a dumb IDE/editor that starts from source code and has to parse into AST into its own...

https://twitter.com/TeaDrivenDev/status/1054177017351024641

Link for convenience: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Error-Return-Trace...

> It's too easy to call functions without being aware of the set of possible errors.

But that's entirely fine! Programmers are far too obsessed with exactly which functions trigger which errors when it absolutely doesn't matter. All you need to know is what errors you can handle and where in the code you can handle them.

If there is a network exception and can recover and retry it at the start of the operation, it literally doesn't matter which of the thousands of functions up the call stack could have possibly triggered it. The only thing you need to know is the top-level network exception and where your network processing code starts. And if you can't handle a network error, it literally doesn't matter if one was triggered. The best you can do is abort and record a really good stack trace for that type of error.

> All you need to know is what errors you can handle and where in the code you can handle them.

Surely also what errors can occur. Can the network using library throw disk IO errors? Permissions errors? Maybe it handles all the network errors internally to the library and I don't need to deal with those at all.

How do you handle those other errors though? If there is a disk I/O error, you're basically done. Permission errors, same thing. You report, abort, maybe retry.

You don't really need to know in the specific what kinds of errors can occur. If it's possible to recover from an exceptional situation, it's only useful to know if that situation is possible so you can avoid writing code you don't need to. But there wouldn't be any harm in writing an exception handler for an exception that can't happen except for that wasted effort.

Well it depends on what I'm doing and why the errors might be thrown right? Is it something I can let the user retry if they know what's happening (e.g. IO error because the output folder doesn't exist)? Whether I retry on network errors can depend on what the error is - if the end service is responding saying my call is invalid for certain reasons there can be a good case to just die immediately rather than slowly backing off trying repeatedly in vain.

The flip side of this is I shouldn't need to worry about exceptions that cannot be thrown. When you say all you need to know is what you can handle and where, that list must be a subset of the possible list of things that can be thrown. There's no point worrying about whether I should be retrying something due to network faults if it never uses the network to begin with.

I think of this way; there are broad categories of exceptions that you can handle and specific exceptions. But those exceptions are significantly smaller than the set of all possible exceptions my code (and the framework code) can trigger. I shouldn't have to worry about every possible exception, just ones I can handle. Checked exceptions/errors means you have to deal with the minutiae.

For your example if retrying network, I prefer to simply have a "ShouldRetry" property/interface on the exception itself since the triggering code has the best knowledge of how it should be handled. No need to know every possible network exception and sort them into retry or not retry.

> Is it something I can let the user retry if they know what's happening (e.g. IO error because the output folder doesn't exist)?

My favorite error handling is when you can just put a single handler at the event-loop of a UI based project. On exception you just show them the message and continue running. The stack unwinding code ensures the application maintains correct state and that the operation is unwound. If the user clicked "save" and a failure occurred they get the message and can retry if they want.

This [1] article by Raymond Chen is one of my favorite on exceptions.

I admit there is an elegance to exceptions, but when I'm trying to write reliable code, I find reasoning about exceptions significantly increases my cognitive load. Error handling is a place where a little more verbosity is okay because it keeps my focus on the local context rather than having to consider the entire call stack. I basically agree with the TL;DR of the article: "My point is that exceptions are too hard and I'm not smart enough to handle them".

[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050114-00/?p=...

This kind of thinking has permeated my coding practice.

I used to think "this is hard, I need to learn about more systems until I'm smart enough to do this."

Now I think "this is hard, there's probably something wrong with the architecture. I'll fix it."

That's the mistake with exceptions; if you assume every method can throw any kind of exception it actually reduces your cognitive load. Now you just have to worry about what you can handle in the 2 or 3 places in your code you can actually handle exceptions. Instead of infinite number of places an error can occur and the huge number of possible errors.

The idea that error states are perfectly knowable everywhere in the code is a myth. Even if that were possible at one moment, the instant anyone changes code anywhere it will immediately be wrong.

> Now you just have to worry about what you can handle in the 2 or 3 places in your code you can actually handle exceptions

This is only true if your application has no state or invariants that could possibly be invalidated in the face of exceptions. For instance, what would be your solution to the 'NotifyIcon' example given in the linked article?

> The idea that error states are perfectly knowable everywhere in the code is a myth. Even if that were possible at one moment, the instant anyone changes code anywhere it will immediately be wrong

This applies equally to both error codes and exceptions. If a method N layers down in your call stack changes its behavior, that's a potential breaking change regardless of your choice of error handling.

> For instance, what would be your solution to the 'NotifyIcon' example given in the linked article?

The notify icon code is poorly structured to begin with. Simply creating a NotifyIcon object adds it to the UI? That's an awful design. If there was an add to UI step then it would be a non-issue; the half-constructed NotifyIcon object would never get added to the UI. This issue is not magically resolved by having to explicitly handle every error; you can make the same mistake with twice as much code.

> This applies equally to both error codes and exceptions. If a method N layers down in your call stack changes its behavior, that's a potential breaking change regardless of your choice of error handling.

I'm not talking about changing behavior, I'm talking about changing implementation. Behavior is part of the contract. But being able to safely change implementation is the fundamental principle of abstraction and is the basis for polyphorphism. If a method today does a calculation using a database but tomorrow is refactored to use a webservice -- as long as the contract/behavior is unchanged -- then the rest of the code shouldn't have to know about it.

> It's too easy to call functions without being aware of the set of possible errors.

Yes, and that's a very good thing.

> Many c++ projects disable exceptions entirely.

Yes, and they're objectively wrong.

> Writing "exception safe" code is tricky and non-obvious.

The word 'exception' here is redundant.

> The word 'exception' here is redundant.

Exceptions make it much harder.

> the only problem with exception-based handling is the lack of explicitness. It's too easy to call functions without being aware of the set of possible errors.

That's the whole point of exceptions.

there are a lot of points in language design that people don't all agree on, or that might be appropriate for one kind of work and not for another.

Many languages have the possible exceptions as part of the function signature so you can't call a function without either handling, converting or passing any exceptions you may receive. It's a drag though.

>There's a certain irony that the presenter quickly dismisses exception-based error handling, and then the first example handles an error by printing a message and exiting -- exactly what an unhandled exception does.

That would indeed be ironic if that case was the only thing exception-based error handling entails. That is, if every program just let all exceptions go uncaught. Which is nowhere near why exception handling was invented, or how it's used in practice.

> the only problem with exception-based handling is the lack of explicitness. [...]. Writing "exception safe" code is tricky and non-obvious.

Does it still hold if you assume automatic resource (memory/locks/handles/etc.) freeing? (e.g RAII)

I think it is safe to assume Zig fits into low level applications, staying closer to hardware, so competition should be with Go instead. SaaS could be out of the circle and often web based having less memory utilization.

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