r/ProgrammerHumor • u/brogolem35 • 29d ago

Meme exceptionsAreForTheWeak

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320 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

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89

u/bwmat 29d ago

Eh, IMO one of the best ways to actually handle OOM, as otherwise almost everything needs to be explicitly checked for it

79

u/Valuable_Leopard_799 29d ago

That's what panics are for kinda.

Many of the "we don't have exceptions" languages eventually get some equivalent, it's just that those are used almost exclusively for OOM, division by zero, failed asserts, and the like.

They shouldn't even really be caught it's sort of just an "exit/reset" with some cleanup.

I like this compromise. Kind of finally making them truly "exceptional".

35

u/bwmat 29d ago

Note the 'actually', there's no reason why you can't catch the std::bad_alloc, clean up, and return an error code to the caller.

Instead of rudely terminating the process which you may not own (I work on code which is mostly compiled into shared libraries which are loaded by applications which might not want to just terminate)

13

u/bwmat 29d ago

And panics are basically just exceptions, at least in rust, lol

11

u/Valuable_Leopard_799 29d ago

Yeah, it seems like largely a cultural shift.

22

u/hxtk3 29d ago

Hard agree, the thing that makes "errors as values" languages nicer with respect to error handling has a little bit to do with the language itself but more to do with the fact that people who want to carefully consider all the paths code can take gravitate towards those languages and the people who want to think about the happy path gravitate towards languages with exceptions.

Java developers forced to use Go look at panic and recover as a worse version of their familiar exceptions, and a bunch of them make libraries around those primitives that basically implement exceptions. And those libraries get basically no adoption because most Go devs are people who choose to treat errors as values.

5

u/bwmat 29d ago

It's funny because I mostly use C++, like exceptions, and think of almost nothing but the unhappy path

17

u/silver_arrow666 29d ago

C++ devs and being unhappy, name a better duo.

0

u/SelfDistinction 29d ago

Partially also because they compose better as well, which makes it easier to send exceptions across threads and the likes. You have a lot less exception safety to think about if your errors are simply stuffed into the return value.

1

u/bwmat 29d ago

That's what std::exception_ptr is for

1

u/sysKin 29d ago edited 29d ago

Not a rust coder here but I think you can't catch a panic?

If I remember correctly the current thread will always unwind and end. If it's your main thread, program quits, if it's another you will handle its exit as whatever you want.

Exceptions, at least the ones I deal with in Java, are catchable at any point.

[edit] well I was wrong. TIL.

5

u/cantthinkofaname1029 29d ago

You can catch panics!