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Comment by emsy | Hacker News Reader

The error bubbling up is a good thing. It at least allows you to find missing error checks in the underlying code. Good luck trying to find an unchecked return code. It seems you mix up problems innate to exceptions (like messing with the control flow) with user problems (unchecked errors/exceptions).

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> Good luck trying to find an unchecked return code.

We're talking about alternate programming languages that handle errors vs exceptions differently, so it's only fair if we consider a language designed from the start not to need exceptions.

So let's take Rust, for example: In Rust, it's not a matter of luck at all: You declare whether your return code may be ignored; if not, it's a compile error not to use it.

Fair enough, error checks should always be enforced. I think errors and exceptions are both valid concepts that solve overlapping problem areas. Java has checked exceptions, so you can statically enforce exception handling.

In c you can declare a function with __attribute__((warn_unused_result))

Not even used for the C standard library and that would lead to warning spam as every printf call could fail and if there is anything I have never seen it is C code checking the return value of printf.

You would only mark functions where it’s a bad idea to return the error code that way. Printf isn’t a function like that, and fprintf probably isn’t (use case of printing to stderr), but fwrite is.

... “bad idea to ignore the error code” ...

It took a few days to notice.

> C standard library

is an mostly an ancient POS

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