Recently withoutboats posted a series of blog posts about some syntax sugar he would like added to Rust.

The gist of it is, as far as I can tell, there should be some way to not have to write Ok(...) for the happy path in functions which return Result. He specifically is advocating for a throws keyword that would go a bit beyond just this basic change, but the problem he’s mainly trying to fix is having to type Ok(...) so often.

I haven’t really been involved with the Rust community that much, especially since I stopped working on Way Cooler. This isn’t from lack of using Rust, I use Rust in my day job after all, but rather from disinterest in getting involved in what seems to be mostly bikeshedding. The .await war was the final straw to make me stop watching the Rust community beyond what comes in the release notes.

So in many ways I’m coming into this argument as an outsider – I have not read any thing beyond the two linked blog posts and am missing most of the discussion that has gone on. I’m not going to weigh in on throws vs some annotation vs Fehler because even though I have an opinion I detest bikeshedding.

However, as a long time user of Rust (4 years, wow how time flies!) the constantly changing standard of what constitutes “idiomatic Rust” is starting to wear me down. try!() -> ?, the addition of impl trait, and the dyn keyword are all features that have changed what it means to write idiomatic Rust. When these features come out I need to now change my code in order to keep it idiomatic.

That’s not to say I hate these features. I remember being very happy when ? came about and dyn is certainly clearer than what we had before. However having to make these superficial changes again and again causes churn in all my codebases. Because Rust releases every 6 weeks that means every 6 weeks I might need to make superficial changes to my codebase (not to mention potentially have to do a major point release – using impl is an API breaking change).

So to bring my complaints back around to the issue at hand: if Ok wrapping came in the next Rust release this would be another change that requires me to update my code in order to be idiomatic. This isn’t sustainable for me – I appreciate Rust team’s commitment to backwards compatibility but the constant disregard for forwards-compatibility makes me feel like I’m on a treadmill trying, and failing, to keep up.