alt.hn

2/28/2026 at 3:18:10 PM

Ow My Foot – Error Handling Across C, Go, Rust, and Google's Absl

by nlz

2/28/2026 at 3:18:10 PM

Author here. I've been working with Rust more recently, and thinking through its error handling ecosystem led me down a rabbit hole comparing it to what I'd used before — C, Go, exceptions, and Google's Absl Status. The post ended up being a broader survey of error handling principles across languages and organizations than I originally planned. Looking forward to input — I'd love to hear what your experiences with error handling have been like, especially across different languages or at scale.

by nlz

3/1/2026 at 4:14:29 AM

Feels like it was written by Claude... the writing style is instantly recognizable. It's quite fatiguing to read!

by cyber_kinetist

3/1/2026 at 7:23:43 AM

Didn't read the article, but OP's comments here sure set off the AI warning bells.

by shawn_w

3/1/2026 at 12:42:47 AM

Interesting. The Odin Programming Language has some primitives that are pretty similar to Absail's macros.

For control-flow we've got the postfix operators: `or_return`, `or_break`, `or_continue` For alternative values we've got postfix `or_else`.

Considering how much I enjoy Odin I should probably entertain using Absail for my next C++ project.

by leecommamichael

2/28/2026 at 3:26:53 PM

Great survey. One thing I'd push further on your principle 2.3: the reason .context() chains work better than stack traces isn't just ergonomics, it's that they preserve causal information rather than mechanical information. A stack trace tells you which functions were on the call stack. A context chain tells you what the program was trying to do. These are fundamentally different things, and the gap widens dramatically with async code, where the mechanical stack is often meaningless.

by joshsegall

2/28/2026 at 3:30:16 PM

Great point — the causal vs mechanical distinction is a cleaner way to put it than what I wrote. Context chains preserve application-specific, causal information about what you were trying to do. Stack traces just tell you where code happened to be executing. That gap gets huge with async, where the mechanical stack is basically noise.

by nlz