Hacker News Reader

Comment by loeg | Hacker News Reader

  let mut file = File::create("foo.txt").context("failed to create file")?;

Of all the things I find hard to understand in Rust, this isn't one of them.

View on HN

Important to note that .context() is something from `anyhow`, not part of the stdlib.

What's the "?" doing? Why doesn't it compile without it? It's there to shortcut using match and handling errors and using unwrap, which makes sense if you know Rust, but the verbosity of go is its strength, not a weakness. My belief is that it makes things easier to reason about outside of the trivial example here.

The original complaint was only about adding context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46154373

If you reject the concept of a 'return on error-variant else unwrap' operator, that's fine, I guess. But I don't think most people get especially hung up on that.

> What's the "?" doing? Why doesn't it compile without it?

I don't understand this line of thought at all. "You have to learn the language's syntax to understand it!"...and so what? All programming language syntax needs to be learned to be understood. I for one was certainly not born with C-style syntax rattling around in my brain.

To me, a lot of the discussion about learning/using Rust has always sounded like the consternation of some monolingual English speakers when trying to learn other languages, right down to the "what is this hideous sorcery mark that I have to use to express myself correctly" complaints about things like diacritics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com