Wandering Thoughts archives

My pessimism about changes to error handling in Go (but they'll happen)

I've said in the past that Go is not our language, and I still stand by that. At the same time, the Go developers do eventually respond to the clamour from the community, which I maintain that we've seen with both Go's eventual addition of generics and the change to Go modules and Go dependency handling (where Go started with one story until it clearly didn't work and they had to change). This leads me to two related views.

First, I think that changes to Go's error handling are inevitably coming sooner or later. Error handling is something the community keeps being unhappy about (even though some people are fine with the current situation), and we know that some people in the core team have written up ideas (via, also). This issue is on the radar, and because it's such a popular issue, I think that change is inevitable.

At the same time, I'm not optimistic about that change, because I don't think error handling is a solved problem. We have a relatively good understanding of things like generics and dependency management, but we don't have a similar understanding of 'good error handling' that can drive a good new implementation in Go. It's possible that the Go developers will find something great, but I think it's more likely that what we'll get is a change that comes with its own set of drawbacks (although it'll be better overall than the current approach).

Go is slowly but steadily becoming a more and more complicated language, and a new method of error handling will inevitably add to that complexity. Also, as I once wrote about an earlier error handling proposal (and another one), a change in error handling will inevitably change how Go is written. People will be pushed to write code that works well with the new error handling mechanism and some number of people will use it for nominally clever tricks, because that's what happens with any language feature.

All of this leaves me feeling somewhat pessimistic about any error handling changes to Go. The current situation isn't ideal, but at least the language is kept simple. Given that error handling isn't a solved problem, I'm not sure any error handling change will improve things enough to make up for its other effects.