[Yoric]

Interestingly, every time (and I mean _every_ time) that I've tried to use `errors.As` on errors raised by lib code, I found out that the lib just went with "nah, I'm just going to use `errors.New` or `fmt.Errorf`", which makes the error impossible to match.

So... I'd say that this is a fumble in the design of Go.

[wbl]

%W exists to solve this

[Yoric]

It would, if people actually defined new errors. But, as I mentioned in my message, people just use `errors.New` or `fmt.Errorf`, all the way down, so you end up with errors that cannot be matched. Which means, in turn, that if these are errors that should be handled properly (and not just propagated/logged), they cannot.

[the_gipsy]

How? Stringly matching? That's not typesafe at all.

[wbl]

No it wraps the underlying error

[the_gipsy]

But the underlying error stays unmatchable. Doesn't sound like a solution if you have to duplicate every error type, and worse, they don't even map 1:1 but now you have the same underlying error wrapped to god knows how many different errors.

For example, the lib produces some an error "bad file descriptor". You'll be wrapping it when you call fileOpen, fileDelete, etc etc 20 times. So you will be wrapping it in "open error", "delete error", etc, 20 times. You cannot try to match it to "bad file descriptor", that information is lost, you now have 20 relatively useless errors.

Except if you stringly match.

[wbl]

https://pkg.go.dev/errors#Is and https://pkg.go.dev/fmt#Errorf clearly state that there is a way to match these errors if the package exposes the values, which the stdlib does.

[Yoric]

Which only works when the error itself doesn't contain any information.

It's better than nothing, of course.

[the_gipsy]

Ah okay, it seems to work because errors are pointers, and errors.Is just checks for equality.