Comment by muvlon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by muvlon | Hacker News Reader

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C unions are sum types if you just "draw the rest of the fucking owl". C has sum types the way x86 assembly has function calls. You see, there are "call" and "ret" instructions. Just figure out calling convention and the stack yourself, it's easy. And yes I can stick the tag next to the union myself in C and write a bunch of functions that hopefully deal with it correctly. I can even write some macros that look like pattern matching and maybe convince myself that it's a language feature, but it just isn't.

And it's very evident why the difference matters. People gravitate to what's readily available and ergonomic. That's why every C API under the sun (most definitely including libc itself) does janky stuff like returning -1 or "*" on error instead of building their own bespoke Result-style abstraction. A programming language is not just the things that are in some way possible within it, but more importantly the things that are easy in it.

While I agree that this should come out of the box, the "rest of the fucking owl" is a tiny macro or function, so not exactly something difficult to do complex as "drawing an owl" would imply.

There are different amounts of effort you can pour in to this depending on your requirements, and we can argue about those, but to me the evidence is clear: It's too much of a hassle for library authors to actually go and do it. Everyone just uses sentinel values instead.

Sure, when I last wrote a sizeable chunk of C, I wrote those macros and with a bit of help from new-ish compiler warnings, I got a reasonable error handling system in C. But whenever I interacted with anyone else's code, they apparently didn't get the memo that this is possible and desirable.

A language should encourage writing robust/secure code, not just make it possible.

While I see the point, I am not entirely sure I agree. I kind of like that C is not an opinionated language which tells you exactly how to write things. This comes at the cost that many people will do things in a bad way, and this is difficult to fix, but still probably easier than getting them to move to a different language.

In any case, I do not think the issue here is caused by not having a pre-defined result type. Checking for null would have been fine. The issue was that to accommodate old and broken code a compromise was made. But as long such compromises are done even where fixing such old code would be quite easy, it is clear that changing to another language is completely unrealistic. So what are we even talking about? The real issue is that nobody wants to spend money or effort maintaining the old code. No language can fix this.

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