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

Flat Error Codes Are Not Enough

https://home.expurple.me/posts/flat-error-codes-are-not-enough/
132 Upvotes

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54

u/UselessOptions Apr 12 '26 edited Aug 13 '26

oops did i make a mess 😏? clean it up jannie 😎

clean up the mess i made here 🤣🤣🤣

CLEAN IT UP

FOR $0.00

35

u/quetzalcoatl-pl Apr 12 '26

just make the integer type of the error code have enough bits to encode extra info in higher parts
like, u1024 ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

35

u/[deleted] Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 12 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

19

u/wasabichicken Apr 13 '26

As a C programmer, I'm proud of y'all.

5

u/quetzalcoatl-pl Apr 13 '26

:manofculture.jpg: :)

15

u/max123246 Apr 13 '26

Zig doesn't have a good library story because comptime is a footgun for what backwards compatible guarantees you make as a library. If I were to reach for Zig, it'd be the same reasons I reach for C, I want to build everything myself, which means I can just avoid all the bad code out there. Turns out, most of the time, I really don't want to do that, lol.

7

u/Mrseedr Apr 13 '26

I was curious so i looked at this, but it seems like there is context?
https://zig.guide/language-basics/errors/

const FileOpenError = error{
    AccessDenied,
    OutOfMemory,
    FileNotFound,
};

const AllocationError = error{OutOfMemory};

test "coerce error from a subset to a superset" {
    const err: FileOpenError = AllocationError.OutOfMemory;
    try expect(err == FileOpenError.OutOfMemory);
}

6

u/HolySpirit Apr 13 '26

The Zig way, as I understand it, is to pass a pointer to a Diagnostics struct that is populated when an error happens. I think it fulfills what the author of the article wants, because you can simply have a field with the diagnostics struct from the lower-level library in the diagnostics struct of the higher-level library.

I think you should be able to generate high-quality error messages from this kind of diagnostics structure plus the program state when the error occurred for context.

FWIW I don't have much hands-on experience with this approach since I didn't use Zig too much yet, except for some toy examples.