I’ve always found C++'s “trend” of handling normal or non-exceptional system errors with exceptions lackluster (and I’m being charitable). Overall trimming things down to (basically) passing around a couple integers and telling the user to check their manual is much better, much less error prone, and much more efficient and deterministic.

    • benni@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 months ago

      Same, I also like giving this the [[nodiscard]] attribute if I want to make sure that it’s not ignored.

        • benni@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 months ago

          I’m mixed on this one, because sometimes you’ll want to call a function for its side effects without caring about the return value. E. g. container methods returning an iterator that shows you where the side effect took place.

              • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
                1·
                2 months ago

                Neat, I learned something. I keep smashing C and C++ together on my head.

                The notes on that page do suggest the same method I did, however.

              • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgOPEnglish
                11·
                2 months ago

                First: it’s not new, it’s been around since C++03.

                Second… it’s not even that great. It’s more characters to type and you have to deal with stds and colons. (void) is a classic and works everywhere.

                But hey, at least it’s not static_cast<void>(...).

  • ulterno@programming.devEnglish
    7·
    2 months ago

    telling the user to check their manual

    • So I made an API for a DB.
    • The client was full on using Qt Framework with Qt Creator, so I also made it in Qt.
    • I return QSqlError in my functions and point the user to QSqlError documentation in Qt
      • I even show them that they can press F1 at any time in Qt Creator to get the help page
    • Months later, client engineers raise problem with senior management that they don’t have a bool return value (I am sitting 10m away in the same room as the client. Senior management is in another state)
    • I press F1 on their computer and show the user bool QSqlError::isValid()
      • Note again, that all client devs at this point, have been using Qt, years before I enter.
    • User says they don’t have a bool result.
      • I open their code and show them how to use isValid() in an if statement.
    • User puts a requirement for custom functions returning bool
      • I make more functions for that
    • Months later, I get a bug report, stating that the deleteDocument function is deleting the document but returning false.
    • I check the code
    API::deleteDocument(docId);

if (API::deleteDocument(docId))
{
  // output to UI
}

    Yes, they called deleteDocument on the same ID twice.

    BTW, I did create a manual with usage examples.

    A few months later, a senior engineer on the client side checks their code and tells me to throw exceptions for everything, because half of the time, the user-devs are not checking the QSqlError return values.

    [[nodiscard]]

    From what I remember, that gives a warning an not an error.
    The clients’ code already has >400 warnings[1] on every build. They won’t care

    1. edit: fixed wrong word ↩︎

    • lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.orgOPEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      I have no problem with localizing error messages… I just think an error handler is the absolutelest wrong place to do it. Localize it in the manual. Appendix C page 3, “Spanish / Español”. Error routines should print machine-readable information. A couple numbers. Maybe a smiley (or, given the context, frownley).

  • dreugeworst@lemmy.ml
    3·
    2 months ago

    as long as people are logging pertinent information sure. but I’ve had the misfortune of working with plenty of programs that return just an error code that means ‘something went wrong initialising subsystem X’ and left it all to the user to figure out what exactly went wrong, with files and where in those files etc. etc.

  • mercator_rejection@programming.dev
    2·
    2 months ago

    At work we literally just went through this yesterday, just with folly::Expected. A new guy joined the team and wanted to propose we update how we handle errors.