So how did Rust handle the case of a function that may return an error or nothing? Can you forget to check the error, or does it force you to explicitly handle it in some way?
I understand how Result forces you to handle the possibility of an error when you want to access the actual return value, but I don't know what happens if you aren't planning on accessing the return.
I'm also curious how Result-based error handling composes. For example, if I want to sort a list of structs where my comparison function may fail, can I use the built-in sort function, and still get any error that may have occurred back?
With (unchecked) exceptions, this is trivially easy - the sort() function doesn't need to be aware of exceptions in order for them to be propagated through it. With checked exceptions in Java, you need to go through a little dance of wrapping and unwrapping, but it can still be done. If I understand correctly, in Haskell this can be done with the Either monad and liftM, though I can't claim to understand the specifics.
Is there a Rust solution?