Severe underestimation of dev laziness

Posted Apr 20, 2013 8:37 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: Severe underestimation of dev laziness by k8to
Parent article: A taste of Rust

That is what you might think about checked exceptions: at least the regular code does not have to deal with error conditions. It is however a bad policy: the empty catch() block can mask important error conditions and continue silently as if the process was successful, instead of failing.

With Java Null Pointer Exceptions are not checked (i.e. they don't force you to check for them with a try...catch), but at least it prevents the regular code to deal with the null pointer.

My preferred practice now is to leave exceptions as they are and catch them all only at the root level, logging them carefully. This is why I abandoned checked exceptions but in a very few cases. Catching all exceptions (including unchecked) and logging them also deals nicely with null pointers, without having to write extra code at every point — which is what Rust forces you to do.

Severe underestimation of dev laziness

Posted Apr 23, 2013 19:53 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> without having to write extra code at every point — which is what Rust forces you to do.

Rust allows you to say "this value cannot be null" with less words than saying "might be null" would take. Hopefully developers would prefer the former rather than the latter (I certainly do) which means that the checks don't even have to be written. If Rust had do-syntax from Haskell, checking results in a chain of nullable calls wouldn't even be necessary. I assume some common library will probably implement ">>=" and ">>" in Rust which I'd use in a heartbeat when developing Rust rather than check for None manually everywhere.