Re: Our error-handling is broken (Re: Promise slides)

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 11:25 PM, cowwoc <cowwoc@bbs.darktech.org> wrote:

> On 02/10/2014 2:15 AM, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>
>> Conveniently, we already agreed months ago that in WebRTC and gUM,
>> error callbacks are used for all runtime error reporting and exceptions
>> are used *solely* for programming errors (i.e., the kind of thing that
>> would
>> be a good candidate for compile-time failures and/or asserts in other
>> languages). Thus, this argument about exceptions is largely irrelevant,
>> leaving us with an argument about the relative aesthetic merits of
>> callback chains versus promises.
>>
>>
> Hi Eric,
>
> A few months ago I thought this strategy made sense. Having used Promises
> for the past year I now believe that all exceptions (including those
> associated with programming errors) should get returned by the
> callbacks/promises.
>

I would be generally fine with this as well, though note that there are
some cases where JS simply requires an exception to be thrown.

-Ekr




> Exceptions thrown outside the callback/promise won't get caught by
> developers (who are lazy and won't bother catching exceptions in two
> different places). If all exceptions were tunneled over callbacks/promises,
> then unknown exceptions would typically get logged or otherwise presented
> to the user to pass on to the developer.
>
> Gili
>
>