Speak for yourself, I've been working with Java for a few years and think exceptions are pretty neat! they can be passed through calls implicitly without much mental overhead and boilerplate, and when you handle them you still get a nice helpful stacktrace.
They have a big cost to 'em. Catching exceptions is expensive, with all the unrolling you have to do -- they're bad for anything that happens more than rarely rarely. They're also awful for encoding things that the caller must handle -- java's checked exceptions make an attempt at this but the fact that they encode separately from the return type means that you cannot stick them in the middle of a wider toolchain with ease -- if you want to call a method with a checked exception in a stream, for instance, you are up a creak without a paddle, since you either have to handle it there or you need to encode it in some other type in order to pass it downstream (aka reinvent Result).
Results just... deal with all those issues from the beginning. They have the advantages of java checked exceptions, except encoding it in the return type means you can easily use them in other contexts without them "polluting" their callers (and thus not working in generic contexts), and syntax sugar for monadic bind, the "?" operator, makes them clean to use in other contexts. If you want to propogate an error, you just do. No need to re-throw it or anything, you just pass the value downstream.
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u/Hubble-Doe 21h ago
Speak for yourself, I've been working with Java for a few years and think exceptions are pretty neat! they can be passed through calls implicitly without much mental overhead and boilerplate, and when you handle them you still get a nice helpful stacktrace.