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Comment by Crinus | Hacker News Reader

You are making things sound way more complicated than they need to be, the situation is actually very simple: if you need to return multiple error codes, use a return value for the error code and give back things via an output parameter, otherwise just use a sentinel value for error (0, -1 or NULL depending on context, they aren't totally random you know, 0 and nonzero are used for false/true, -1 is used when you expect some index and NULL when you expect some object). When in doubt just use an error return code everywhere (e.g. what many Microsoft APIs - even some C++ ones - do with HRESULT).

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If it's not that complicated please explain why OpenSSL, the linux kernel, Curl a multitude of very popular C libraries don't do what you describe. Clearly it's complicated enough that even talented C coders try to cut some corners when given the chance.

C error handling ergonomics are non-existent which means that everybody bakes ad-hoc library-specific conventions that are extremely error-prone.

You could argue that they're doing it wrong and you might have a point but if almost everybody gets it wrong maybe it's fair to blame the language itself a little bit.

I already gave an example of APIs that do this - pretty much all COM APIs use HRESULT. I do not know why not everyone does this as i'm not everyone and as such i cannot tell what sort of considerations (if any) were going on. At best i can make some guesses.

BTW curl does seem to do what i wrote above, for example `curl_easy_init` returns a `CURL` object on success or NULL if there was an error [1] and `curl_easy_perform` returns a `CURLcode` value [2] that looks like it is used across the API to indicate errors.

[1] https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/curl_easy_init.html

[2] https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/curl_easy_perform.html

The kernel very much returns sentinel values, if something more complicated has to be transmitted error codes are commonly used. I see nothing wrong with it.

I'm not arguing that the kernel devs are doing it wrong. I'm only pointing out that, in my opinion, the way C deals with error handling (that is, by not doing anything at all) is far from reasonable and the cause of many bugs. It's terrible ergonomics.

If you have a kernel function returning a pointer and you think that you're supposed to check for NULL when it actually returns a ERR_PTR in case of errors you will not only fail to do the check but on top of that end up with a garbage pointer somewhere in your program. If you have a MMU and you try to de-reference the pointer you'll have a violent crash, which at least shouldn't be too hard to debug. If you feed the pointer to some hardware module or if you're working on an MMU-less system then Good Luck; Have Fun.

C doesn't have your back here. It doesn't let you signal how a function reports errors, it doesn't even let you tag nullable pointers.

Often you need to return error objects. Consider a function for parsing something. You want to return not only the error code, but also the line and column number of the parse error, and a description of it. So you need two output parameters; one for the result and one for the error. Your declaration becomes something like this:

    bool parse(inp_type *a, out_type **b, out_error **c);

where the return value false indicates an error. In C++, you'd just have written something like:

    out_type parse(const inp_type& a);

and thrown an exception on error.

In C you can return a struct, however a better approach is to use a context object which also contains error information, like:

    ctx_t* ctx = ctx_new();
    if (!ctx) ... fail ...
    if (!ctx_parse(ctx, code)) {
        show_error_message(ctx_erline(ctx), ctx_ercol(ctx));
        ... more fail ...
        ctx_free(ctx); /* often done in a goto'd section to avoid missing frees*/
    }

This also allows you to extend the APIs functionality, error information, etc in the future while remaining backwards compatible.

Which is great, except that ctx_new() requires a malloc, which then can fail, and now you can't even explain why the thing failed, as you have no context info.

You also have to worry about all of the ctx objects you've created along the way, to free them up as you recover from the low memory error.

That is very similar to the way I handled errors back in my C days.

Yep, you're absolutely right. But don't tell me that is simple! :)

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