Good Code, Bad Code

4 Errors

This chapter covers

• The distinction between errors a system can recover from and those it cannot recover from
• Failing fast and failing loudly
• Different techniques for signaling errors and considerations for choosing which to use

The environment in which our code runs tends to be imperfect: users will provide invalid inputs, external systems will go down, and our code and other code around it will often contain some number of bugs. Given this, errors are inevitable; things can and will go wrong, and as a result we can’t write robust and reliable code without thinking carefully about error cases. When thinking about errors, it’s often useful to distinguish between errors from which a piece of software might want to recover and those ...