signaling.md

% Signaling errors [RFC #236]

The guidelines below were approved by RFC #236.

Errors fall into one of three categories:

• Catastrophic errors, e.g. out-of-memory.
• Contract violations, e.g. wrong input encoding, index out of bounds.
• Obstructions, e.g. file not found, parse error.

The basic principle of the convention is that:

• Catastrophic errors and programming errors (bugs) can and should only be recovered at a coarse grain, i.e. a thread boundary.
• Obstructions preventing an operation should be reported at a maximally fine grain -- to the immediate invoker of the operation.

Catastrophic errors

An error is catastrophic if there is no meaningful way for the current thread to continue after the error occurs.

Catastrophic errors are extremely rare, especially outside of libstd.

Canonical examples: out of memory, stack overflow.

For catastrophic errors, panic

For errors like stack overflow, Rust currently aborts the process, but could in principle panic, which (in the best case) would allow reporting and recovery from a supervisory thread.

Contract violations

An API may define a contract that goes beyond the type checking enforced by the compiler. For example, slices support an indexing operation, with the contract that the supplied index must be in bounds.

Contracts can be complex and involve more than a single function invocation. For example, the RefCell type requires that borrow_mut not be called until all existing borrows have been relinquished.

For contract violations, panic

A contract violation is always a bug, and for bugs we follow the Erlang philosophy of "let it crash": we assume that software will have bugs, and we design coarse-grained thread boundaries to report, and perhaps recover, from these bugs.

Contract design

One subtle aspect of these guidelines is that the contract for a function is chosen by an API designer -- and so the designer also determines what counts as a violation.

This RFC does not attempt to give hard-and-fast rules for designing contracts. However, here are some rough guidelines:

• Prefer expressing contracts through static types whenever possible.

• It must be possible to write code that uses the API without violating the contract.

• Contracts are most justified when violations are inarguably bugs -- but this is surprisingly rare.

• Consider whether the API client could benefit from the contract-checking logic. The checks may be expensive. Or there may be useful programming patterns where the client does not want to check inputs before hand, but would rather attempt the operation and then find out whether the inputs were invalid.

• When a contract violation is the only kind of error a function may encounter -- i.e., there are no obstructions to its success other than "bad" inputs -- using Result or Option instead is especially warranted. Clients can then use unwrap to assert that they have passed valid input, or re-use the error checking done by the API for their own purposes.

• When in doubt, use loose contracts and instead return a Result or Option.

Obstructions

An operation is obstructed if it cannot be completed for some reason, even though the operation's contract has been satisfied. Obstructed operations may have (documented!) side effects -- they are not required to roll back after encountering an obstruction. However, they should leave the data structures in a "coherent" state (satisfying their invariants, continuing to guarantee safety, etc.).

Obstructions may involve external conditions (e.g., I/O), or they may involve aspects of the input that are not covered by the contract.

Canonical examples: file not found, parse error.

For obstructions, use Result

The Result<T,E> type represents either a success (yielding T) or failure (yielding E). By returning a Result, a function allows its clients to discover and react to obstructions in a fine-grained way.

What about Option?

The Option type should not be used for "obstructed" operations; it should only be used when a None return value could be considered a "successful" execution of the operation.

This is of course a somewhat subjective question, but a good litmus test is: would a reasonable client ever ignore the result? The Result type provides a lint that ensures the result is actually inspected, while Option does not, and this difference of behavior can help when deciding between the two types.

Another litmus test: can the operation be understood as asking a question (possibly with sideeffects)? Operations like pop on a vector can be viewed as asking for the contents of the first element, with the side effect of removing it if it exists -- with an Option return value.

Do not provide both Result and panic! variants.

An API should not provide both Result-producing and panicking versions of an operation. It should provide just the Result version, allowing clients to use try! or unwrap instead as needed. This is part of the general pattern of cutting down on redundant variants by instead using method chaining.