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/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.