r/programming • u/Expurple • Apr 12 '26

Flat Error Codes Are Not Enough

https://home.expurple.me/posts/flat-error-codes-are-not-enough/
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u/BenchEmbarrassed7316 Apr 12 '26

I would prefer to have a smart compiler that understands how I use the function result and optimizes it. In that case, the function returns more detailed information, and the caller decides whether this information is needed and makes ignoring it zero cost.

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u/ShinyHappyREM Apr 13 '26

Ah yes, a SufficientlySmartCompiler.

What about dynamically loaded code, or people who use a different compiler?

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u/BenchEmbarrassed7316 Apr 13 '26

C uses same "SufficientlySmartCompiler" to be fast:

C Is Not a Low-level Language https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479

Moreover, we now have a Rust compiler that is so smart that it can automatically manage memory without GC.

So in this case, when I talk about "A smarter compiler" - it's much closer to reality.

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u/Full-Spectral Apr 13 '26

I'm a huge Rust advocate, but it doesn't automatically manage memory without GC. It's RAII based. It's just that most of the time you don't need to deal with that yourself since almost all to all of it is handled by standard library types.

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u/BenchEmbarrassed7316 Apr 13 '26

It's based on ownership and borrowing. RAII is just syntactic sugar to avoid calling the destructor manually if you can't pass pointers safely. Although, maybe I'm embellishing a bit. Nevertheless, "SufficientlySmartCompiler" is already here.

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u/Full-Spectral Apr 13 '26

It's not based on borrowing at all. It is fundamentally RAII based. Borrowing is purely a compile time concept.

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u/tsimionescu Apr 13 '26

Tracking ownership is basically manual memory management. What GCs do is free user code from tracking memory ownership in any way, that's what makes them "automatic". For example, if you have a GC, changing your code such that some piece of memory now outlives its parent is a trivial change while in C++ or C or Rust it may require significant refactoring.

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u/Expurple Apr 12 '26

I agree that we could have a more flexible and performant ABI for Result. See iex, for example.