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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

> The main disadvantage of a Rust-?-like syntax for Go is you lose the ability to add context to the error

You don't lose the ability to just by that syntax existing. You could still do so by writing it out the long way like you have to do anyway today in Go.

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There's also helper crates like eyre simplifying the process of adding context even further (at the cost of type erasure):

    foo().context("oh no")?

What do you mean by "at the cost of type erasure"? Isn't type erasure an attribute of a programming language and not something that a library has control over?

In this case, it means your actual error will be packed and boxed someplace behind a smart pointer, its type will be lost (so you wouldn't be able to match on its specific variants downstream might you want to) but it will be still able to format itself to a string and will comply with std::error::Error trait.

Indeed. What I meant is that compared to the pre-existing error handling, there are use cases it won’t fit. I am pro-? syntax. I think it would be useful even without being able to add context, but I’m also interested to see if there are solutions that could handle this for you.

? is short syntax for something nobody should ever do. Why add special syntax for something you should literally never do?

And why should nobody ever do that?

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