[narag]

Catching exceptions to throw exceptions with better messages is something I would stronly suggest

Also not every user in the world understand English.

I catch exceptions in two levels. One is the user initiated action. I seldom see this specified, but it seems obvious to me: if the user decides to do X, either X is done or a clear and meaningful message is shown, explaining what and why could not be done.

There is another finer grained location to do what you say (collecting details), logging and then re-raising up to the other level.

Swallowing errors is evil and no, not limited to C code.

[btschaegg]

Interesting point. I have to confess that I've never seen logging done usable in a i18n sense. Of course, for UI applications, you're absolutely right.

When it comes to logging details, you have a point. But I still think a clear final error message is something to aspire to - especally if you're writing very busy and potentially multithreaded (or - even worse - async) services.

On this note, filtering logs according to thread IDs can be very helpful here. I wonder if that is also easily possible with "fibers".

> Swallowing errors is evil and no, not limited to C code.

Of course, nothing ever is - it's just where I've seen this thing the most (highly anecdotal evidence, I know :-) ). Unfortunately, the nature of many C APIs also makes it very non-obvious if you're skipping through the code, whereas an empty catch statement stands out somewhat.