[philosopher1234]

You claim to understand the decisions, so I’ll push you on that.

Why is go error handling designed the way it is? What are the intended benefits? What are the actual benefits?

A follow up, on your abstraction point: why does go eschew abstraction? Intended upside? Actual upside?

It’s very clear people in these threads can perceive downsides of some of Go’s decisions, but what about upsides? And further, can you recognize how Go copes with the downsides it’s choices produce?

[neilparikh]

> but what about upsides?

I don't know much about Go, and I'm one of those people who mostly sees the downsides, so I guess I'll ask you about one of my biggest issues with the language (in the hopes of broadening my perspective on this): what is the upside of returning a value and error, rather than a value or an error? Or I guess, more precisely, why is that the default and only way to do things [1]?

For context, I'm a big fan of explicit errors and errors as values over exceptions as a general principle: my preferred language is Haskell, where Either (essentially Result) is the main way to doing error handling, and exceptions are very rarely used.

[1] - I can see a few cases where returning both is useful, but I can't see it being what I want most of the time

[philosopher1234]

I agree that Either is more semantically correct. But is it more readable? Is it easier to manipulate? I don't think so. To have either, you need two big concepts:

1. Sum types. These can be really useful, and they _might_ improve Go, but they are undeniably a new complication and something users must now understand to work with Go code. This is not free. Is it the best use of developer minds to be paying rent to the Sum type concept? Or might dev teams be better off using that rent on some other domain specific problem?

2. Unwrapping. Now you have a container for your data, and you have to peel it apart to manipulate the data. This is a minor cut, but it adds up over time, and I think it leads to necessarily more convoluted code. `if err != nil` is the cost of separate err types, but visually its minor and Goland at least auto-collapses it so it interferes as little as possible with your code. I think matching on errs, or just propagating the error case, are both more complex for readers to parse. Furthermore, propagating a naked error loses crucial context (where in this function did we fail? what info from this function do I need to debug this?) that is dead simple to add in Go.

I think a sum typed has a semantic advantage, but it also has a cost, and I think you can make an argument its not worth the dough.

[macrael]

Not to get in the way of the fun, but my point at the start was less about the semantics of an Optional type in particular, but more about how in the absence of an Optional (or I suppose a nil value) people abuse nil pointers as a stand-in, and that's been a source of lots of bugs I've seen.

The language was designed without a nil value opting instead for an empty value. It turns out that in lots of real-world applications some kind of affordance for "this doesn't exist" is so common that even standard libraries use nil pointers to model that. That leads to bugs because now lots of things are pointers that don't actually need to be passed by reference and the language's affordance for _everything_ being able to be passed by value is being circumvented. An optional type (even without any full blown support for sum types in the language) would have solved this problem neatly.

[stouset]

> You claim to understand the decisions, so I’ll push you on that.

I don't know why I'm biting at this, because it's clearly a set-up.

No matter what I say here, if my explanation of their design is in any way incomplete, I'll be taken to task for that omission and held up as an example of yet another ignorant hater who clearly doesn't understand the brilliant minds of its creators. If I accurately detail most of its purpose but make a handful of minor technical errors (after all, it's been years since I stopped using it), I expect the same.

Here goes anyway.

> Why is go error handling designed the way it is? What are the intended benefits? What are the actual benefits?

Go's error handling is designed in response to the problems its authors perceive with exceptions. There are many genuinely reasonable problems one might wish to design around.

Unchecked exceptions implicitly bubbling up from any function you might call is something they wanted to avoid. They wanted to encourage handling errors as close as possible to where those errors occur. They want to force error-handling to be explicit. And they believe that error-handling code is as important—if not moreso—than the "happy path" code, and so shouldn't be tucked away out of sight.

All of these goals are reasonable. It's ultimately the execution that's turned out awful.

What are the actual benefits? Well, it's hard to argue against the explicitness but personally I wouldn't call it a benefit. Sampling random large projects in Github demonstrates that production go code is something approaching (and potentially even exceeding) 50% error-handling stanzas in practice. In making things explicit, they've swung the pendulum way too far in the opposite direction and managed to make actual program logic dramatically more difficult to decipher.

Unchecked exceptions can't implicitly bubble up through your code, it's true. But most go error handling just... explicitly bubbles those same errors up, "decorating" them with text to serve as breadcrumbs when trying to understand where an error occurred. We've simply created human exception handlers and in doing so have lost stack traces in the process. There appears to be no convention of declaring per-error structs that might help one determine what went wrong programmatically, so every error is effectively "stringly" typed and after it's been bubbled up once it's effectively impossible for a higher layer of code to understand specifics of what might have gone wrong. Was the problem with your HTTP call a network error (try again!) or a server error (fatal)? If for some reason you couldn't handle it right where it happened, you have little chance of being able to tell the difference between the two later.

The benefits they did reap have come with some pretty massive caveats. And with this design, they've brought in additional own-goals that should have been so easy to avoid but somehow weren't.

Calling a function and doing something with the value or bubbling up the error is something like 95%+ of error handling in go. Rust makes this a single character: `?`. With go, you're forced to copypasta the error-handling stanza, hiding the actual logic you're trying to accomplish in pointless administrativia.

Further, with tuple values, you get a value and an error rather than a value or an error. For a function that returns an `int, error`, you get back a real `int` along with your error! If you make a mistake and forget to actually handle the error or bubble it up, it's all to easy to use the value. Its value might be well-defined (usually the zero-value) but the semantics of that value likely aren't. Ask me how many bugs I've seen in production code where a bug in error-handling allowed meaningless zero-values to plow their way forward through happy-path logic before causing problems somewhere completely unrelated to where the original error occurred!

All of this is to say, go's designers had real, valid concerns with exceptions in mind when designing the language's error handling constructs. What they didn't seem to do was consider what problems their design would introduce. Of course, most (but not all) of these problems could have been sidestepped by having an Option/Result type like Rust (or equivalently, a Maybe/Either type like Haskell). There's even precedent in the language for "blessed" generic types like maps and slices! They could have done this, even without introducing full generics.

> A follow up, on your abstraction point: why does go eschew abstraction? Intended upside? Actual upside?

This post has already gotten too long and honestly anyone who wants to love go despite its warts isn't going to be (nor should they be) convinced by someone writing a dissertation on HN so I'll leave the rest as an exercise to others.

But put simply, the authors' insistence on simplicity at all costs have simply put the burden of complexity on everyone else. A computer is a tower of abstractions hundreds of layers deep. Go's authors' thesis is tantamount to saying that Abstraction Level 481 is "just right" and even a single additional one would claerly make things impossible to reason about.

When one considers it in the wider scope of how many layers there already are and how the language hamstrings its users' ability to make meaningful layers below it, the whole thing comes across as absurd.

[philosopher1234]

I understand why you’d expect me to be dismissive, but I appreciate your taking the time to write this. Errors are certainly verbose, but I personally find the benefit to debuggability and readability (where could this function possibly fail?) worth it. I think the considered and hand crafted error messages knock stack traces out of the park. I think the pain of unwrapping a Result type, and the pain of annotatingbit with function specific failure information, would be a step down from gos error handling.

Again, I understand why my comment came off as a trap, but trapping you is only one of my intentions! I’m also interested in understanding where you’re coming from, so thank you.

[sullyj3]

The pain of unwrapping a result type? What's painful about it? If, rather than automatically bubbling it up with ? operator, you want to handle the possibility of failure inline explicitly, it's a simple case of pattern matching that's no more verbose than the `if err != nil` idiom

    match fallible_function() {
        Err(e) => // handle error
        Ok(val) => // do something with val
    }

In this case, you of course don't need to annotate the outer function's type with its possibility of failure. In the case where you use ?, you of course do have to annotate the possibility of failure. However, I think trying to argue that this is more painful as syntactic ceremony than constant nil checks is a non-starter.

It's a strict improvement. You can choose to unwrap on the spot with the same amount of syntactic ceremony as go, except with the compiler checking you've handled the cases. Or, you can do the same thing you were going to do in go anyway, with a single character and a type annotation instead of a stanza.

All this is ignoring the extra power methods like `map`, `map_err`, `map_or_else`, etc, give you.

[philosopher1234]

Whats painful:

1. Extra indentation for both cases, instead of shoving only the error case aside. 2. How do you annotate the error with details of the current function? In go you can write `return fmt.Errorf("parsing point (id=%v): %w", id, err)` and easily add crucial context for devs to understand why an error occurred. This seems harder to do in rust.

Calling that a strict improvement is too black and white, and the point of my asking others to name good things about Go is to force a more nuanced conversation.

[sullyj3]

1. You can use that style as well. You're free to return early in the error arm of the match, and make use of the Ok value in later straight line code. I've done that in fallible_function in this example:

    fn main() {
        // prints "first call worked"
        if let Ok(i) = fallible_function(Ok(1)) {
            println!("first call worked");
            
        }
    
        // prints "second call failed: FallibleError("error!")"
        if let Err(e) = fallible_function(Err("error!".to_string())) {
            println!("second call failed: {:?}",e);
        }
    
    }

    #[derive(Debug)]
    struct FallibleError(String);

    fn fallible_function(x: Result<i32, String>) -> Result<i32, FallibleError> {
        let y = match x {
            Err(s) => { return Err(FallibleError(s)); },
            Ok(i) => i,
        };
    
        // y now contains the i that was in the Ok.
        // do straight line code with y here
    
        Ok(y)
    }

2. You can create custom errors for a specific function, and put any data that you would have passed to Errorf inside. This way you get the ability to introspect errors to see what went wrong programmatically, and all that data is available for later inspection. Note that we could also have returned a formatted string on error instead of FallibleError exactly like in Go if we wanted to.

Of course, the way you'd write fallible_function if you weren't going out of your way to be verbose would be like this:

    fn fallible_function(x: Result<i32, String>) -> Result<i32, FallibleError> {
        let y = x.map_err(|s| FallibleError(s) )?;
        // y now contains the i that was in the Ok.
        // do straight line code with y here
    
        Ok(y)
    }

Separately, the point of all this is to be able to statically know whether a function can fail or not. We know for a fact that fallible_function can fail. If we write a function

    fn f(x: i32) -> i32 { .. }

We know for a fact it won't fail (unless it panics, but well behaved code should never panic). We don't even have to worry about the possibility of nils getting in there and screwing us up.

[philosopher1234]

A lot of the criticism of go is a little bit like a guy who hates New York pizza saying “New York pizza sucks, it’s only 1”. Chicago pizza has 4 more inches which has been state of the art for years”

Sure, it’s different, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad, and if your criticism only focuses on one detail and leaves out the whole picture, no kidding you produce a harsh judgement.

[stouset]

Frankly your dismissal of people's legitimate concerns with the language as just uneducated griping by fools is one of the reasons I and so many others avoid it and its community like the plague.

I don't know what it is about go, but for some reason it seems impossible to have reasoned—if passionate—disagreement about the language. Any criticisms are hand-waved away as just ranting. Everyone who actually uses it knows that none of these things are real problems. And... what are those real problems, anyway? Can't think of any!

I love Rust, but I'm more than happy to dive into its warts and agree with legitimate complaints and concerns. Hell, I love Ruby too and that language is full of questionable decisions. Not only are language designers imperfect, but there's no such thing as a perfect language anyway. Great decisions have downsides, and there's no sense in acting like those downsides don't exist.

Why is it that gophers never seem to be willing to admit that their language—like all others—has warts, bad tradeoffs, good tradeoffs with uncomfortable but acceptable downsides, and flat-out mistakes? To any criticism, the response is the same: "you don't understand the design", "go's simplicity is its strength", "I've never needed that feature", etc. Hell, the inventor of `nil` calls it his billion-dollar mistake and someone is in this wider discussion arguing that nil pointer dereferences aren't that big a deal.

Where on earth are the gophers that will stand up and say, "Yeah, <X> part of golang sucks. I'd change <Y, Z> if I could. But I still really think it hits the right balance overall." Instead, it's all just regurgitation of the same Kool-Aid.

[philosopher1234]

I’m happy to acknowledge real trade offs made by go. Error handling in go makes writing code harder. This thread is very hostile to go, so it makes sense that my comments express similar hostility.

[morelisp]

> This thread is very hostile to go

It's a programming language, it'll be OK.

[philosopher1234]

Sure, but I like Go a lot and am going to defend it, particularly from what I see as baseless or misinformed accusations (that quickly veer into resentment and ad hominem).

[morelisp]

Don’t, it’s not a good look.