[etxm]

So much this. “Let it crash” is cargo culted too hard IMO. If a caller (being another library or end user) can be given information to correct an error, give it!

Let it crash works well for a phone system where it doesn’t make sense to call both parties back if the thing failed.

[dnautics]

Uh I think the rule of thumb is, if you're writing a library do return an error tuple because it gives the caller the option, and if you're a mensch also provide a bang function. If you are consuming a library in most cases let it crash.

[querulous]

let it crash is great for unrecoverable errors as it gives you clean state as if the thing that caused the error never happened but it's terrible for cases where you want to actually capture the error and react to it. give me a structured log event or an error code every time over a stack trace