C for Rust Programmers

> I really love Rust's error handling. Result forces you to address errors ...

> C's error handling story, in comparison, is straight up tragic. It seems to boil down to functions returning a "magic integer" like -1 or a null pointer to signal there was an error.

In C23 you can add the [[nodiscard]] attribute to the declaration of an enum or struct type, then at every call site of every function that returns said type, the C compiler will emit a warning if the result is unused. Instruct the compiler to treat warnings as errors and you can't ignore them.

Interestingly, Zig's error handling is conceptually C like, but limited to integer-like enums (no structs). It's basically a union of error integer code and success result. However, despite being limited to integers, Zig has dedicated compiler machinery for this so there's idiomatic consistency in Zig error handling.

I've tried to build a C like rust transpiler - https://github.com/xyzzyapps/carbide

I hope it can be useful for writing C ABI bindings especially for things like CLAP audio plugins. Writing C ABI plugins in Rust is needlessly painful. Crystal has a much easier way to write C bindings.

That linked stackoverflow post about dereference operators is really interesting. I guess it answers my question why do most struct members in posix have a prefix abbreviating name of the containing struct.