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Comment by wredue | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. The error type requires so much boilerplate that I honestly thought I was stupid and doing something wrong. But nope. Just horrific amounts of boilerplate.

Then people who don’t want to engage with ThisError and Anyhow do bullshit hacks like making everything a string that has to be parsed (and don’t provide functions to parse).

I get why it is that way, but it feels icky.

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> I get why it is that way, but it feels icky.

There is no reason it has to be so boilerplate heavy, a lot of it can be fixed but someone has to put in the work. The only technical reason that could hold it back is compile times.

Zig has automatic error unions. No boilerplate at all, but not just a single "error" type. The only downside I see in zig errors is that they can't hold extra data.

It's a massive downside. When I was using the JSON parser I found it very annoying that it could only tell me the input JSON was invalid, not where in the input the problem was.

Yeah I agree. I think they tend to go for a mutable parameter reference to keep track of that stuff, which is definitely C-like but kinda unwieldy.

Of course there is a reason it is this way. In lower level languages, compilers need to know the type and size of the type at compile time. This holds true even for languages with looser typing like C.

You are not going to get strict types in a low level language and also get ergonomic errors. This is fundamentally not how compilers works.

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