Having just concluded the series on handling errors without using exceptions, now’s a good time to check up on an assertion I made in the first part: exceptions are slow. A good question to ask is “compared to what?” So let’s put them up against good old error codes and the new Either type I presented in the series. Which is fastest when there is no error? Which is fastest when there is an error? Read on to find out!
Posts Tagged either
Last week’s article introduced the Either class as an alternative to exceptions that makes it easy for functions to declare their error results in addition to their success results and for callers of those functions to handle both results. Today we’ll go further by linking together multiple functions to handle all the error cases almost transparently. Read on to learn how to make the most out of Either!
Exceptions are the de facto way to handle errors in C#, but they have problems. Callers don’t know if the function they’re calling will throw an exception at all or which types of exceptions it’ll throw. Exceptions also introduce an alternative control flow that’s often hard for programmers to follow. They make our code slower too, even when never thrown! Today’s article introduces an alternative to exceptions to help solve all of these issues. Read on to learn a new way to handle errors!