[Animats]

Maybe not perfect, but it seems to work out better than exceptions. Exceptions are a good idea which turned out to be too complicated.

A language has to use destructors to clean up for almost everything for this to work. "?" has no "catch" clause within the function. So if an object has an invariant, and that invariant must be restored on error, the destructors must restore the invariant. If that just means unlocking locks, closing files, or deleting data structures, that works. If some more complex invariant needs to be restored, "?" isn't enough. The calling function has to clean things up. This usually means encapsulating the function that does the work in a function that handles errors and cleanup. Basically, a try block.

[hikarikuen]

This recent post resonated with me: https://cedardb.com/blog/exceptions_vs_errors/

There are certain obvious (and some less obvious) benefits to both exceptions and results, but I get the impression a lot of programmers have overreacted against exceptions.

Exceptions "just work" the same in every codebase and require little boilerplate in most languages. I think results really shine for internal business logic where errors are more "invalid" than "exceptional."

[surajrmal]

That's what panics are for. They compile to the same code c++ exceptions would. You can unwrap your results to turn them into exceptions.