[Animats]

After several false starts, Rust mostly got this right with returning

    Result<usefulresult, Error>

from most functions, and using "?" for "If the result of this is Error, do a return of the error". There's also a thing where you can write

    foo().context("useful info about foo")?

and pass some more info with the error.

Plus, most things that work like "open" close when their scope closes, so you don't need all that "defer" stuff.

I would have liked a good error hierarchy like Python 2 had, where there was a clear distinction between program-is-broken errors and errors due to external causes. But Rust didn't get that at the beginning, and now it's too late.

[tveita]

I believe the Context trait is from Anyhow, not part of the base Error trait in Rust.

anyhow::Error really does a good job of smoothing out the finicky bits of Rust error handling, it feels and reads a lot better than Go code to me.

[Animats]

Yes, Context is part of Anyhow. That's a legacy problem. Something like Anyhow should have been the base of almost all errors, but it came too late. If you get error handling wrong at the start of a new language, it's really hard to make changes, because the old format gets baked into everything.