[swift-evolution] A unified error handling mechanism?

[Fernando Rodríguez]

Hi,

I do a lot of training and one of the features of Swift that seems more
confusing to students (and myself) is error handling. There are too many
ways of doing it, and none seems satisfactory.

Let's take for example an initializer. There are 2 different ways of
handling errors within an init:

a) Old School: return nil. This was very simple in Objective C, because the
uncommon case of an error could be easily ignored...until everything
crashed.

In Swift it's not easy (nor advisable IMHO) to completely ignore the
possibility of an error. Besides, it has 2 complications.

First of all, you return an Optional, and Optionals have a tendency to go
viral. Suddenly, all your code has to deal with optionals.

Secondly, you have no information about the error itself.

b) do/try/catch

This allows you to have information about the error, but also causes the
newly created object to be "trapped" inside a do block.

Are there any plans to address this situation? I believe there should be a
single, obvious and convenient way of handling errors in the language.

What do you guys think?



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*Fernando Rodríguez*

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