Re: [RFC PATCH 1/1] Add a type for errors

> On 2024-10-02 at 09:54:52, Phillip Wood wrote:
>> On 30/09/2024 23:03, brian m. carlson wrote:
>> Part of the reason it works well in rust is that it supports discriminated
>> unions with pattern matching and has the "?" macro for early returns. In C
>> the code ends up being quite verbose compared to taking a pointer to error
>> struct as a function parameter and returning a boolean success/fail flag.
>>
>>      struct git_error e;
>>      struct object_id oid;
>>
>>      e = repo_get_oid(r, "HEAD", &oid);
>>      if (!GIT_ERROR_SUCCESS(e))
>>          return e;
>>
>> With a boolean return we can have
>>
>>      struct object_id oid;
>>
>>      if (repo_get_oid(r, "HEAD", &oid, e))
>>          return -1;
>>
>> where "e" is a "struct git_error*" passed into the function.
> 
> Yes, I agree that this is more verbose than in Rust.  If we were using
> Rust (which is a thing I'm working on), then we'd have nicer error
> handling, but for now we don't.
> 
> However, Go still uses this kind of error handling, and many people use
> it every day with this limitation, so I don't think it's too awful for
> what we're getting.

>> In conclusion I like the general idea but have concerns about the verbosity
>> of returning an error struct. It would be helpful to see some examples of
>> this being used to see how it works in practice.
> 
> If I send a v2, I'll try to wire up some code so folks can see some
> examples.