thiserror and anyhow
The thiserror and
anyhow crates are widely used to simplify error
handling.
- thiserroris often used in libraries to create custom error types that implement- From<T>.
- anyhowis 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 Errorderive macro is provided bythiserror, and has lots of useful attributes to help define error types in a compact way.
- The std::error::Errortrait is derived automatically.
- The message from #[error]is used to derive theDisplaytrait.
anyhow
- anyhow::Erroris essentially a wrapper around- Box<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 for- Result<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::Contextis a trait implemented for the standard- Resultand- Optiontypes.- use anyhow::Contextis necessary to enable- .context()and- .with_context()on those types.