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

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Sep 30, 2024, 22:44 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqv7yc3goa.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <20240930220352.2461975-2-sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>

"brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> writes:

> ....  It is designed to be passed and returned by value, not
> pointer, and it is possible to do so in two registers on 64-bit systems.
> Similar functionality works well for error types in Rust and for the
> standard library's lldiv_t, so this should not pose a problem.

It should not, in the sense that "any reasonable platform should be able to pass two 64-bit word in a structure by value", but isn't it optimizing for a wrong (i.e. have error) case? In the case where there is no error, a "negative return is error, zero is success", with a pointer to "more detailed error info, in case the call resulted in an error", would let us take branch based on a zero-ness check on an integer in a machine-natural word, without even looking at these two words in the struct.