Introduction to Go-style Errors

Overview of Go's error handling philosophy and how go-errors brings it to TypeScript/JavaScript.

Introduction to Go-style Errors

This library, go-errors, brings Go's error handling approach to TypeScript and JavaScript. Go's error handling is known for its explicitness and simplicity, avoiding the complexities of try-catch blocks in favor of returning errors as values. This page introduces the core philosophy and how go-errors implements it.

Go's Error Handling Philosophy

In Go, functions that can encounter errors typically return multiple values: the result and an error. If the operation is successful, the error is nil; otherwise, the error contains information about what went wrong. This approach has several key characteristics:

  • Explicitness: Errors are always explicitly returned and must be handled by the caller. There's no hidden error propagation like with exceptions.
  • Simplicity: Error handling is done using simple if statements, making the code flow easy to follow.
  • Values as Errors: Errors are treated as regular values, allowing them to be passed around, inspected, and transformed easily.

go-errors: Bringing Go-style Errors to TypeScript

go-errors provides a type-safe and elegant way to implement this error-handling pattern in TypeScript and JavaScript. It introduces the Result type and a set of core functions (goSync, go, goFetch) that encapsulate operations and return Result tuples.

Key Advantages of Using go-errors

  • Type Safety: Full TypeScript support ensures that you're handling errors correctly and that your code is robust.
  • No try-catch Blocks: Avoid the nested structures and potential performance overhead of try-catch.
  • Unified API: A consistent API for handling both synchronous and asynchronous operations.
  • Enhanced Fetch: goFetch provides built-in response and error transformation capabilities, simplifying API interactions.
  • Predictable Error Handling: Makes error handling explicit and predictable, leading to more maintainable code.

Next Steps