[gravypod]

(Opinions are my own)

> Also, their "no exceptions" rule only applied to work involving their legacy code.

The reasons for not using exceptions are outlined in this post: https://abseil.io/tips/76

absl::Status is basically exceptions without language sugar. Or, another way of looking at it, golang err in C++. Basically, non-local control flow is dangerous as it can't be evident to the programmer when something deep in the stack will bubble up an exception.

It is super annoying to deal with sometimes but there are a lot of amazing helper macros (yuck for other reasons) that exist. More details can be found looking through here: https://cs.opensource.google/search?q=ASSIGN_OR_RETURN&sq=

[fivea]

> Basically, non-local control flow is dangerous (...)

This is the crux of the error you're making. Exceptions are not about control flow. Exceptions are a transparent and clean way to handle exceptional events. Exceptions are not intended to, say, handle the status code of a HTTP requests. Exceptions are intended to handle exceptional and potentially unrecoverable errors in a safe and controlled manner, such as failing to allocate memory, regardless of where and how they pop up.

Therefore, suggesting classical C-style return codes or specialized monadic types to handle results as alternatives to exceptions completely misses the whole point of exceptions and, more importantly, all the classes of problems they are designed to eliminate.

[gravypod]

> Exceptions are a transparent and clean way to handle exceptional events.

I'd sum up this argument as: Exceptions are syntax sugar that allow callers of a function to ignore the error cases of something they are calling and depend on something that calls into them to handle the error case.

An example:

    void HandleRequest(const Request &request, KV &kv) {
        ...
        kv.set("a", 10);
        ...
    }

In this example KV.set will raise an exception. The programmer implementing HandleRequest isn't directly exposed to this fact and so to them, and the reviewer, and future onlookers this code looks correct. Now lets say kv.set() throws an exception in production under a specific case. Maybe there were two people attempting to set the same value at the same time or a networking issue. Doing this in the context of a webserver might make sense as the webserver might handle exceptions as error codes but that's not the end-all-be-all. Suppose we refactored to something like this

    Something CreateSomething(....);

How do you know if this function will throw an exception? How do you find all of the possible exceptions that can be thrown? Statically you can't really. If instead you see

    absl::StatusOr<Something> CreateSomething(...);

You can tell for sure that the result has some error that needs to be handled. Your original code:

    kv.set("a", 10);

This code no longer compiles in an absl::Status world. Instead you'd need to do something like:

    CHECK_OK(kv.set("a", 10)) // this will panic
    RETURN_IF_ERROR(kv.set("a", 10)) // Bubble up

From this we get:

1. a stack trace since RETURN_IF_ERROR adds metadata about the call site.

2. Guarantee that code will not compile if errors are not handled.

3. Guarantee that future readers know that some very high level function could probably call into code that can produce an error you need to handle.

This matters much more if things like this are happening:

    kv.beginTransaction();
    kv.set(...);
    kv.endTransaction();

This could be handled by destructors in this case but in other cases:

    otherService.startingWork();
    kv.set(...);
    otherService.doNextStep();

There are cases where destructors do not make sense. You do not always want to call `doNextStep()` as it would be 100% wrong in the case where we cannot set our value in our kv store. Contrived but I've run into these in real life services. If a developer sends me the above code snippet I might LGTM. If the developer instead sends me:

    otherService.startingWork();
    if (!kv.set(...).ok()) { log("something went wrong"); }
    otherService.doNextStep();

I'll be able to point to the exact problem with this code much more easily. Also if there's an outage and I need to read this code I can clearly see why this `something went wrong` in the logs correlates to incorrectly called doNextStep().

I'm not saying that Status is perfect (I'm not 100% sold) but exceptions are a type of control flow in an abstract sense. The problem some people have with it is it's control flow you can't audit.

[ncmncm]

No.

Exceptions are a way to ensure that failures are directed immediately to a place designated to deal with such a failure.

They are, in particular, not any sort of "syntax sugar", unlike "?" in certain other languages, or your StatusOr thing. A function that throws an exception does not, in any sense, return to its caller. It does not construct any sort of return value. It does not consult the stack to see where it came from and resume running there.

And, exceptions are totally auditable. There is never any hint of ambiguity or uncertainty about where an exception will take you.

You can be confident that if a function was thrown from, it was because it could not perform the requested action. And, you can be confident that if an exception was not thrown the function called satisfied whatever postconditions it promised.

So, you don't need to know if a function might throw. You may instead assume any function might throw. If it doesn't, then it has satisfied its documented postconditions. Your obligation is only to ensure that destructors clean up any intermediate state on the way out. These identical destructors get exercised every time through the code, so are exercised frequently.

Error-handling code at places where the error cannot actually be dealt with properly, that just tries to propagate the failure up the call chain, is typically not well tested, and often cannot even be triggered in testing.