Comment by BoppreH

2 days ago

I'd argue that's the fault of having default nullability, not the exceptions. You would have the same problem if every attribute access returned a Result<T> too.

And I'm not a fan of breaking control flow, but I still find it preferable to nulls. A null may travel far from the place where it was generated before blowing up, making troubleshooting harder, or it might come from a function you called for its side effect but forgot to check the return value. I gotta say I'm also a careful enthusiast of checked exceptions, it's great knowing which ways a function can fail.

But I think the consensus is growing that Result<T> (plus warnings for unused return values) is simply the superior choice.

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BoppreH

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hedora  2 days ago

C has what you are asking for, mostly:

   int foo f() __attribute__((warn_unused_result))

As long as an error condition on the return value causes a crash on use, then it's mostly the same as result. (The main remaining difference being that you do an implicit `.unwrap()` in C, and in things like rust that's an explicit code smell.)