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Errors

Tue, Sep 18, 2018

Error handling and where Go2 gets it wrong

This is an article which I’ve struggled with for the past few weeks. It started plainly enough trying to write about unit testing in go, but there was a lot of overlap with error handling and a significant portion of that was taking a hard look at the Go2 error handling draft. I’ve written and re-written this article many times, where it morphed from advocating simple assertions in tests to make unit testing easier, to actually having a detailed look at where Go2 error handling falls short.

Error handling in Go

Error handling in Go is uniquely designed to be explicit in the intent. You should return possible errors from functions and check/handle those returns. This, in contrast with other programming languages, might seem verbose and unfriendly, but it isn’t really so. Let’s go over some basic examples and move on to something less trivial.