I'm just now learning Rust, as a long time C++'er, and this was the first part of my Rust journey where I thought to myself, "Boy, this really smells--this couldn't possibly be the idiomatic Rust Way to handle functions that can produce different types of errors. I must be doing something wrong!"

For example, I have a function that takes an array of bytes, decodes it as UTF-8 to text, parses that text into an i32, and checks the int that it is within a valid range. This is not a big function. But it might produce one of: 1. str::Utf8Error, 2. num::ParseIntError, or 3. MyCustomInBoundsError. There's no clean way to write a Rust function that could return either of them. I had to bundle everything up into an enum and then return that, and then the caller has to do some "match" acrobatics to handle each error differently.

I hate to say this, but I miss Python and C++'s exceptions. How nice to just try: something and then:

    except SomeError:
        doFoo()
    except ThatErrror:
        doBar()
    except AnotherError:
        doBaz()
    finally:
        sayGoodbye()

An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

What do I know though? I'm still in the larval stage of Rust learning where I'm randomly adding &, *, .deref() and .clone() just to try to get the compiler to accept my code.