thiserror
and anyhow
The thiserror
and
anyhow
crates are widely used to simplify error
handling.
thiserror
is often used in libraries to create custom error types that implementFrom<T>
.anyhow
is often used by applications to help with error handling in functions, including adding contextual information to your errors.
use anyhow::{bail, Context, Result}; use std::fs; use std::io::Read; use thiserror::Error; #[derive(Clone, Debug, Eq, Error, PartialEq)] #[error("Found no username in {0}")] struct EmptyUsernameError(String); fn read_username(path: &str) -> Result<String> { let mut username = String::with_capacity(100); fs::File::open(path) .with_context(|| format!("Failed to open {path}"))? .read_to_string(&mut username) .context("Failed to read")?; if username.is_empty() { bail!(EmptyUsernameError(path.to_string())); } Ok(username) } fn main() { //fs::write("config.dat", "").unwrap(); match read_username("config.dat") { Ok(username) => println!("Username: {username}"), Err(err) => println!("Error: {err:?}"), } }
This slide should take about 5 minutes.
thiserror
- The
Error
derive macro is provided bythiserror
, and has lots of useful attributes to help define error types in a compact way. - The
std::error::Error
trait is derived automatically. - The message from
#[error]
is used to derive theDisplay
trait.
anyhow
anyhow::Error
is essentially a wrapper aroundBox<dyn Error>
. As such it's again generally not a good choice for the public API of a library, but is widely used in applications.anyhow::Result<V>
is a type alias forResult<V, anyhow::Error>
.- Actual error type inside of it can be extracted for examination if necessary.
- Functionality provided by
anyhow::Result<T>
may be familiar to Go developers, as it provides similar usage patterns and ergonomics to(T, error)
from Go. anyhow::Context
is a trait implemented for the standardResult
andOption
types.use anyhow::Context
is necessary to enable.context()
and.with_context()
on those types.