Registration is now open for CppCon 2021, which starts on October 24 and will be held both in person and online. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting videos of some of the top-rated talks from our most recent in-person conference in 2019 and our online conference in 2020. Here’s another CppCon talk video we hope you will enjoy – and why not register today for CppCon 2021 to attend in person, online, or both!

The Dawn of a New Error

by Phil Nash

Summary of the talk:

As a community we've tried many different ways to express, propagate and handle error conditions in our code over the years. Each seem to have different trade-offs, with none being perfect in all cases.

This presentation is the follow-up to my earlier talk, "Option(al) Is Not a Failure", where I surveyed existing error-handling approaches and score them against each other, leading up to the new proposal, p0709, "Zero-overhead deterministic exceptions".

We'll summarise some of that background so we're all on the same page, but in this talk we're going to dig into the proposal in more depth - and look at the supporting proposals, p1028 (std::error) and p1029 ([[move relocates]]) and others. We'll also comment similar mechanisms in other languages, notably Swift, to get an idea of how it might work out in practice.