Go's Error Handling Sucks – A quantitative analysis
Go’s error handling sucks because it forces its developers to propagate errors up the callstack manually, whereas you could CATCH and THROW errors since 1972 using MacLisp according to Wikipedia.
Some claim that Go’s way of handling errors encourages developers to actually handle the damn errors instead of letting exceptions float freely in the hope of someone else handling it. I believe, on the contrary, the way we currently handle errors leads to visual satiation where your screen is filled with if err != nil { return ... } blocks as you manually propagate errors. It has become a masochistic cult where veterans are trying to convince newcomers that this is actually better.
Another shortcoming of Go’s errors is that they are extremely primitive. error is an interface with a single method Error() that returns a string intended for humans. That’s it. Callstack or any other debugging information is missing by default, unless you choose a third-party package such as pkg/errors and Wrap() your errors as you propagate them. The standard library doesn’t encourage sane behaviour either, forcing developers to either string-search or cast errors in undocumented ways.
To prove how inefficient this is, I’ll grep the source code of Go’s flagship projects for the following snippet:
if [...; ] err != nil {
return ...
}
which is nothing but simply propagating the error up the callstck (i.e. return the error to the caller as soon as you encounter an error); something a compiler or a runtime would do if we were using a more modern language using the exceptions mechanism. For this purpose, I’ll use the following regex:
err != nil {\n\t*return
and multiply the number of times this occurs with 3, since it takes three lines of code.
| # Lines of Go Code | # Lines of Code for Manual Propagation | Ratio | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kubernetes | 2,912,663 | 43,587 | 4.49% |
| Go | 1,606,829 | 7,715 | 1.44% |
| Moby (Docker) | 1,013,087 | 18,738 | 5.55% |
| Cockroach DB | 776,340 | 12,238 | 4.73% |
| etcd | 444,291 | 4,726 | 3.19% |
| helm | 40,056 | 758 | 5.68% |
In conclusion, 3.88% of the Go code written (excluding comments and blanks) consist of manual error propagation, which is problematic.