Hacker News Reader

Comment by Orygin | Hacker News Reader

I disagree, adding context to errors provide exactly what is needed to debug the issue. If you don't have enough context it's your fault, and context will contain more useful info than a stack trace (like the user id which triggered the issue, or whatever is needed).

Stack traces are reserved for crashes where you didn't handle the issue properly, so you get technical info of what broke and where, but no info on what happened and why it did fail like it did.

View on HN

It's one piece of information, but logging at the error location does that still. And if you have a function that's called in multiple places how do you know the path that got you into that place. If it wasn't useful we wouldn't try to recreate them with wrapped errors

You wrap errors primarily to avoid the implementation detail leak. Even where errors have stack traces, you still need to do that, as was already described earlier. What debugging advantage comes with that is merely an aded bonus (A really nice bonus, to be sure. Attaching stack traces is computationally wasteful, so it is a win to not have to include them).

You can get away with not doing that when cowboy coding scripts. Python was designed to be a scripting language, so it is understandable that in Python you don't often need to worry about it. But Go isn't a scripting language. It was quite explicitly created to be a systems language. Scripts and systems are very different types of software with very different needs and requirements. If you are stuck thinking in terms of what is appropriate for scripting, you're straight up not participating in the same thread.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com