This morning I watched a video on Rusts Error-Handling that Larry Garfield posted on Mastodon.

The essence – at least to me – is that Exceptions throw one out of the normal flow of execution just like GOTO does. And we all know that GOTO is bad. SO how does Rust handle Errors, when Exceptions are bad and we always want to return a defined type?

Rust uses Result “enums” instead of a dedicated type that a function returns instead of throwing an exception or returning null. They contain either the expected return value or an Error.

I am not a mathematician. So I might be getting things wrong from a logical point of view. But as a developer I do have a slightly different view on the topic of Error and Exception handling.