There is a lot that I like about Go. Error handling is not one of them. On one hand, I appreciate the simplicity of it all. Nothing special about an error, it’s just part of how you do everything else. But on the other hand, there is something clearly special about an error. It’s something 100% of go users have to deal with in almost every single function call. There is something clearly special about it. These grassroots patterns and efforts to handle multiple errors per function, or async errors etc all should really have better solutions in the language.
I understand that maybe the language authors in the early days didn’t want to lock anyone into a strict paradigm for how to deal with errors. Like I’m not thrilled about Java’s approach either, but that can never change. But Go is a very popular and established language now. It’s time to fix the error handling mess. There are so many good examples out there to get inspiration from. F#, Swift and Rust have a perfect error handling mechanism.
I understand that maybe the language authors in the early days didn’t want to lock anyone into a strict paradigm for how to deal with errors. Like I’m not thrilled about Java’s approach either, but that can never change. But Go is a very popular and established language now. It’s time to fix the error handling mess. There are so many good examples out there to get inspiration from. F#, Swift and Rust have a perfect error handling mechanism.