[tln]

I appreciated the article, but the error handling in Go just bugs me. So verbose...

The built-in tool does not even warn about unused errors... not `go build`, and not `go vet`. What's more important, an ignored error or an unused import?

https://play.golang.org/p/j-oXsZz51ki

[pstuart]

That's by design -- programmer's choice.

[TheDong]

I don't understand.

Go errors out on unused imports, but you can type "import _ foo.com/unused-import" to not error out.

Why doesn't 'errors.New("asdf")' error out and require you to instead write '_ = errors.New("asdf")' to ignore the result

I think the real answer is not that it's intentional design, but rather that the original compiler was not powerful enough to implement that feature easily... and once go hit 1., it was impossible for them to add new warnings or errors because there are no warnings and errors are backwards incompatible.

Sure, that means developers use third-party tools for warnings because the go compiler refuses to ever have warnings (that compromises the pure beauty of the language obviously), but at least that means it's only the users that have to deal with the complexity of using more tools, the compiler developers can ignore it.

[mopsy]

I don't think it's because of the complexity. I'm quite sure it would not have been difficult to do.

One of the reason is that you don't always want to check the error. The most common one is fmt.Println.

I would not like to always write

_, _ = fmt.Println("Hello, playground")

[stubish]

You certainly do not always want to write _,_ = fmt.Println("Hello, playground"), and I think this points out the real lack. What do you want your program to do if fmt.Println starts failing? I think, unless you are explicitly checking for errors, that in all other cases you want it to crash. Rather than silently continue. Which is a bug, and a potentially disastrous one, that is endemic in Go code (and, to be fair, plenty of other languages). Thankfully the practical risk of this particular case is tiny.

This is why you want unchecked errors to implicitly bubble up. Which is what exceptions give you, or perhaps a syntax with implicit error return values rather than Go's by-convention approach.

[pstuart]

If fmt.Println fails you've likely got bigger problems and the game is over.

And if it means a lot in this case, wrap the function and use it instead.

[stouset]

And it’s—bluntly—a terrible design.

[dfischer]

Why? I am genuinely curious. Terrible compared to what?

[latch]

Exceptions.

Anders give an interview in 2003 [1] where he talks about how C# looked to learn from Java's checked exceptions. His conclusion was basically that, in their evaluation, 9/10 exceptions cannot be handled beyond some generic top-level handler.

If this observation is correct, and it certainly aligns perfectly with my own, then bubbling makes a lot more sense.

Note that, with error return values, you can emulate bubbling (which is what most Go programmers end up doing). And with exceptions, you can emulate return values. The question is what's the most common default? And, again, according to Anders, as well as any project I've ever worked on, bubble-by-default is overwhelmingly the most useful thing to support cleanly.

The only way Go's approach makes sense is if you consider it's original goal (system programming) and MAYBE (i don't know, I'm not a system programmer) for such systems you can/need to handle each error. Except that's not really how Go is being used now, so...

[1] https://www.artima.com/intv/handcuffs.html

[jy3]

I've always been annoyed by the parallel control flow introduced by exceptions in any language. They are used so often in many languages where it doesn't feel necessary.

The fact that I don't even have to think if the function call I'm looking at can throw and if I should catch it or not outweighs everything.

[groestl]

Easy, just assume it throws. That's the case anyway. Thanks to panics, even in Go.

Edit: Also, there is no parallel control flow. Languages with exceptions have union-type return values, and every statement is implicitly followed by the equivalent of: if err!=nil return nil, err. The fact that in Go you have to type that makes Go cumbersome, not smart.

[cube2222]

I actually really like Go error handling (I write Go daily), but truth be said, they're a poor mans Either Monad.

[pmarreck]

The thing that bugs me is that if you ignore the error (by simply not checking for it), it's still there, possibly insidiously corrupting runtime state. Imagine trying to debug a file format corruption that happened because some obscure part of the code tried to add to the format and instead errored (silently) and added garbage and then the code just kept chugging along until the state REALLY messed things up.

The thing many programmers don't seem to realize is that a program is a model of a design in the programmer's mind. If the model goes off the rails of the expected design/behavior in any way, that should be considered very bad ASAP... or as many languages treat it, "exceptional".

[lozenge]

I used to forget to put "set -e" in bash scripts. Then one went off and deleted a whole bunch of important stuff despite a prerequisite command erroring. Now I include it, but remembering one line of code in the header is easy compared to Go's approach of remembering to check every error.