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0 pointskitd2y ago0 comments

This is fine as far as it goes. The problem is that the exception can only report context that it knows about. By contrast, the Go version allows you to include any extra context you want, to make debugging easier. Eg, your error might not just include file reading or Json parsing, but which transaction or customer was involved at the time. You can do with exceptions but you either have to try/catch every statement, or add generic context in one big catch block.

I accept it's largely personal preference, but having used both mechanisms for many years, I find Go best practices for error handling are simple and easy to follow, and results in easily maintainable code, compared to exception handling which doesn't really come with a simple set of best practices, meaning it is often badly put together or added as an afterthought.

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theamk2y ago

maybe there are some best error practices out there, but people don't follow that. As an example, I just went to github.com, got the top-trending go project ("ko"], search for error and arrived at this line in [0]:

    dtodf, err := os.Open(filepath.Join(filepath.Dir(file), "diffid-to-descriptor"))
    if err != nil {
      return nil, fmt.Errorf("opening diffid-to-descriptor: %w", err)
    }

See how they forgot to put filename in the error message? if there is some sort of error with the file, you'll have to resort to strace to find out what the name is... Not to mention that this very function returns json parse errors without context, and the caller "getMeta" calls multiple functions and returns the errors without context as well...

best practices are nice, but fully automatic is even better. The minimum-effort path in Python produced vastly more useful traces than in Go, and unfortunately too many programmers go mininum-effort path.

[0] https://github.com/ko-build/ko/blob/cfc13deeb6417d7e1582f031...

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0 pointskitd2y ago0 comments

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theamk2y ago

    dtodf, err := os.Open(filepath.Join(filepath.Dir(file), "diffid-to-descriptor"))
    if err != nil {
      return nil, fmt.Errorf("opening diffid-to-descriptor: %w", err)
    }

[0] https://github.com/ko-build/ko/blob/cfc13deeb6417d7e1582f031...

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