4mo ago

An epic treatise on error models for systems programming languages

Target audience: Practitioners interested in programming language design and familiar with representations of errors in at least a few different languages such as error codes, checked/unchecked exceptions, tagged unions, polymorphic variants etc.
Estimated reading time: 60 to 90 mins.

2 comments

This looks interesting. I had been wondering what if anything the PL experts were saying about the lack of exceptions in Rust.
Quoting the conclusion:
The fundamental nature of errors is that they are often multi-faceted, and complex to reason about by virtue of being multi-faceted. The wide variety of socio-technical contexts that software is created, delivered and used in add further complexity.
The linked The Error Model article is very exhaustive and good.
They end with more concrete experience/findings/conclusions - given the context of a more concrete project and scope and goals.