It’s great that they identified this (incredibly common) pain point and introduced a way to solve it, but I can’t help being disappointed.

Reading the examples I found myself thinking, “that looks like a really useful pattern, I should bookmark this so I can adopt it whenever I write code like that.”

The fact that I’m considering bookmarking a blog post about complex boilerplate that I would want to use 100% of the times when it’s applicable is a huge red flag and is exactly why people complain about Go.

It feels like you’re constantly fighting the language: having to add error handling boilerplate everywhere and having to pass contexts everywhere (more boilerplate). This is the intersection of those two annoyances so it feels especially annoying (particularly given the nuances/footguns the author describes).

They say the point is that Go forces you to handle errors but 99% of the time that means just returning the error after possibly wrapping it. After a decade of writing Go I still don’t have a good rule of thumb for when I should wrap an error with more info or return it as-is.

I hope someday they make another attempt at a Go 2.0.

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grey-area an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I agree go’s error handling feels a bit clunky, though I prefer the local error handling and passing up the chain (if it were a bit more ergonomic) to exceptions, which IMO have a lot of other problems.

The main problems seem to me to be boilerplate and error types being so simplistic (interface just has a method returning a string). Boilerplate definitely seems solvable and a proper error interface too. I tend to use my own error type where I want more info (as in networking errors) but wish Go had an interface with at least error codes that everyone used and was used in the stdlib.

My rule of thumb on annotation is default to no, and add it at the top level. You’ll soon realise if you need more.

How would you fix it if given the chance?

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lenkite 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I close my nose and always wrap errors with a sentinel error for public functions/methods so that callers can check with `errors.Is`. And you can always identify the place in the call-stack where the error occurred.

I need to start getting used to context with cancel cause - muscle memory hasn't changed yet.

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rednafi 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Author here. I absolutely hated writing this piece after shooting myself in the foot a thousand times.

Go's context ergonomics is kinda terrible and currently there's no way around it.

	▲	lemoncucumber 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It was a great piece and I learned a lot, thanks for writing it. I hope you didn’t think that it was you I was disappointed with rather than the language designers :) It’s ironic how context cancellation has the opposite problem as error handling. With errors they force you to handle every error explicitly which results in people adding unnecessary contextual information: it can be tempting to keep adding layer upon layer of wrapping resulting in an unwieldy error string that’s practically a hand-rolled stacktrace. With context cancellation OTOH you have to go out of your way to add contextual info at all, and even then it’s not as simple as just using the new machinery because as your piece demonstrates it doesn’t all work well together so you have to go even further out of your way and roll your own timeout-based cancellation. Absurd.

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XorNot 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are two things I think you could have as implict in Go - error values, and contexts.

Just pass along two hidden variables for both in parameters and returns, and would anything really change that the compiler wouldn't be able to follow?

i.e. most functions return errors, so there should always be an implicit error return possible even if I don't use it. Let the compiler figure out if it needs to generate code for it.

And same story for contexts: why shouldn't a Go program be a giant context tree? If a branch genuinely doesn't ever use it, the compiler should be able to just knock the code out.

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maleldil 3 hours ago | parent [-]

What's the difference between an implicit error and exceptions? Being explicit about errors is good. Go's syntactical implementation, coupled with its unexpressive type system, is the problem.

	▲	XorNot 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I will freely go on the record as saying that there's nothing wrong with exceptions for this exact reason: errors are so common that a function being "pure" is the exception, and that errors-as-value handling invariable turns into an endless chain of something like "if err; return (nil/zero, err)" in every language which tries it. The same would apply to anytime you have Result types - ultimately its still just syntactic sugar over "if err then...". What's far more common in real programs is that an error can occur somewhere where you do not have enough context to handle or resolve it, or you're unaware it can happen. In which case the concept of exceptions is much more valid: "if <bad thing here> what do I want to do?" usually only has a couple of places you care about the answer (i.e. "bad thing happened during business process, so start unwinding that process" and many more where the answer is either "crash" or "log it and move on to the next item".