[groestl]

My point is that this is in no way different from any other class of errors, _except_ in those cases where it is. It's practical to assume all errors are handled like this, because this catch all needs to exist anyway. And unless you have _very specific needs_, this can be automated.

[the_gipsy]

I think conflating these two into one paradigm is worse. The catch-all (exceptions) style is nice only for a few very specific cases, like the request handler example. Everywhere else I want to either bubble up (like exceptions, but Result<> and ? sugar is as good or better), OR I want to handle the error. For the latter case, exceptions are not good at all.

[groestl]

IMHO, quite often when you're tempted to handle an error, you're either wrong to do so, or in some kind of infrastructure glue code. A request handler, a task executor, a strategy chain, a retry loop, you name it. And this code needs to deal with both classes of errors anyway to be bugfree.

[the_gipsy]

From those examples, I think only request and task should deal with panics. Things that start threads or processes.

Other points of "catch all errors" don't need that. And then there are a lot of places where you do handle errors, if they are conceptually a Result. I know you can just catch SpecificError, but the ergonomics are just horrible in terms of control flow.

[groestl]

I don't think threading is relevant to this.

> there are a lot of places where you do handle errors, if they are conceptually a Result

Yet, what's conceptually a result lies in the eye of the beholder, and should not be dictated by an API designer IMHO. Rust's ? is a step in the right direction, but I'd argue since you care about specific errors in maybe 0.1% of invocations tops (in production code), and that's a stretch, the ? should actually work the other way round. And if the mechanism does not provide a way to select specific errors (such as a proper catch clause) the errors it exposes as a result should include runtime errors as well.