[ncmncm]

Option and Result types are as easily coded in C++.

The former is in the Standard C++ library. The latter will be in the next, but anyway the one in Boost has worked fine forever.

Throwing, instead, is a choice unavailable to Rust coders, so you often have no alternative but to return these more complicated things that users are then obliged to unpack. A standard macro makes that easier, and is semantically equivalent to throwing, but imposes substantial overhead on successful calls.

[mathstuf]

The fact that `std::optional<T&>` is verbotten makes them quite a bit more useless. The Boost one is better because it doesn't have this misguided limitation. It's really quite a sad story and a loss to all of C++ that it is this way (and not for lack of trying on ThePhD's part).

> no alternative but to return these more complicated things that users are then obliged to unpack

Yes, thank you. It is much better this way. I think "substantial overhead" needs to be backed up with some numbers here because setting up exception landing pads is certainly not free.

[chlorion]

According to this link (posted below and includes benchmark results and a benchmark you can run), they compared result style error handling with conventional exceptions in C++, and the result style error handling (using an impl of std::expected) was "more than four times slower". According to the link and my understanding, exceptions are essentially "free" at runtime in the non-exceptional case on certain platforms such as Linux, but slower than result style error handling in the exceptional case.

I prefer result style error handling personally and I am not suggesting that it's worse or shouldn't be used, just thought the findings were interesting and worth considering.

https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2022/p25...

[mathstuf]

So I did some testing with Rust and I don't think that the C++ "four times slower" applies to it at first glance. Maybe Rust can just do better optimizations or something because Rust knows that it is a discriminated union, but these kinds of conclusions can't just be ported across languages blindly.

Of course, porting the benchmark for `sqrt` wasn't trivial because (of course) C++ just modifies the span passed in making it easy to abstract out the allocations whereas Rust says "you cannot pass a mutable slice across a `catch_unwind` barrier", so all of my tests end up returning a new `Vec` inside the benchmarked function. I also wonder how much using an inner function for `fib` would allow some TCO to kick in and change results again.

In any case, I don't think that C++'s has anything that satisfies the use cases that Rust's `Option` or `Result` cover in its standard library, so even if `std::optional` and `std::expected` were magically faster, the fact that `std::optional<inner_field_type const&>` is not supported means I can't use it for what I want anyways and I'm back to Boost or hand-coding classes and dealing with corner cases myself. Which is, unfortunately, a C++-shaped problem that has existed for a long time anyways, so…nothing new.

[chlorion]

I agree that "four times slower" may not apply in Rust specifically.

I do think the idea that exceptions are faster at runtime (at least in micro benchmarks) can be ported across languages though just due to the way exceptions are implemented. In any language, a caller of a function that can return a Result or Option always need to branch to unwrap the returned value, but callers of functions that can throw don't have these branches at all (on platforms with "zero cost" exceptions). Whether or not it actually matters in practice is certainly debatable. I would guess that it will never be a real problem for most people.

Wrt to std::optional and std::expected, I also have found them to be pretty clunky and limited, especially compared to the Rust counterparts! The lack of pattern matching is one issue, the lack of optional references is another, and they just don't integrate with the language as well since most libraries and even std functions don't use them!

[Rusky]

C++'s option and result types are much larger, uglier, and harder to use correctly than Rust's. The shift from throwing to returning a Result is not really an increase in complexity- closer to a reshuffling of syntax.

But that's not really all that relevant either, because comparing languages at this level of detail misses the forest for the trees. An interesting comparison takes a step back and compares which problems the languages (try to) solve. Often something that appears to be a clear win for one or the other turns out to be a non-issue.

[arinlen]

> C++'s option and result types are much larger, uglier, and harder to use correctly than Rust's.

What's your rationale for claiming in a swiping generalization that implementing a data type, regardless of all options or approaches and design, has no other option than doing everything wrong?

[Rusky]

I mean, have you looked at them?

C++'s standard library optional type is a tagged union implemented from scratch, with a dizzying array of template metaprogramming to meet the standard's requirements- see e.g. Microsoft's here: https://github.com/microsoft/STL/blob/main/stl/inc/optional#.... This isn't a criticism of the team behind this code, it's just what it takes to do this in C++.

Rust gets most of that functionality from the language instead, in a much cleaner way. Sum types are built in, value categories and move semantics are handled automatically, there is little-to-no metaprogramming, and most of the API is just simple convenience combinators with obvious implementations: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/library/core/s...

If nothing else, this is a clear counterexample to the claim that "Option and Result types are as easily coded in C++."

[arinlen]

> I mean, have you looked at them?

Last time I looked at Rust's std::Result, it's implemented as a tagged union.

Most of C++'s implementations of a Result data type are implemented as tagged unions as well.

What's your point?

> This isn't a criticism of the team behind this code, it's just what it takes to do this in C++.

The only conceivable argument you can possibly make is argue that Rust might support tagged unions as language primitives, but that would be totally pointless as Result types are relevant for the interfaces and higher level abstraction they provide, not your personal opinion of how hard someone else had to work to implement them.

I've developed Result and Either types in a few languages, including C++, and the only hard thing about C++ is doing the usual homework to handle lvalur/revalue/revalue well.

[ncmncm]

> it's just what it takes to do this in C++

False.

[LegionMammal978]

Do you have any examples of how std::optional could be implemented more simply?

[ncmncm]

The std::optional in MSVC was implemented in a language considerably behind current C++, for obvious reasons. The need to use template metaprogramming in implementations is much less, today.

[ncmncm]

The substantial performance overhead, in Rust, of code to handle those types is unavoidable, even where source-level inconvenience has been minimized.

Overhead is imposed all up and down the call chain, every time through. Seems pretty relevant to me.