Rust Programming Cookbook

Seamless error handling

Exceptions represent a special case in many programs: they have their own execution path and the program can jump into this path any time. Is this ideal, though? This depends on the size of the try block (or whatever the name); this might cover several statements and debugging a runtime exception stops being fun quickly. A better way to achieve safe error handling could be to integrate errors in the results of a function call—a practice that can already be seen in C functions where the parameters do the data transfer and the return code indicates success/failure. Newer, more functional paradigms suggest something akin to the Result type in Rust—which comes with functions to elegantly deal with the various outcomes. ...