[scarface_74]

When I’m using grep, it’s usually in the context of shell script. For all intents and purposes it’s a library.

I can choose to handle the error myself or let the shell script crash by having “set -e”.

Grep returns a non zero error code and it’s still up to me to decide how to handle it.

[invalidname]

That's your point of view. It's up to you. My experience is different and often deals with handles very large projects with serious continuous uptime. When you have dozens of developers committing to a project and using the APIs exiting with an error just isn't an option.

[scarface_74]

I did say

> I can choose to handle the error myself

[invalidname]

That's not a practical strategy in a large system. That's why we have exception handling.

When we write generic library code we have no way of knowing how to handle an error in the full system. We want to concentrate some of the error handling while still making localized decisions in various places.

E.g. I want metrics and observability details updated, yet I want locally to retry some behavior. Doing this every time there's an error would force every library and every part that can fail in my code to know how I plan to handle the error.

[scarface_74]

Isn’t that what I just said? It’s my responsibility as a consumer of the library to decide how to handle it?

[invalidname]

Then I must have misunderstood you as speaking from the perspective of the library. Sorry.