This post is an updated version of an article from five years ago, now that everything Sy talked about is in the standard and implemented in Visual Studio.

Functional Exception-less Error Handling with C++23’s Optional and Expected

by Sy Brand

From the article:

In software things can go wrong. Sometimes we might expect them to go wrong. Sometimes it’s a surprise. In most cases we want to build in some way of handling these misfortunes. Let’s call them disappointments.

std::optional was added in C++17 to provide a new standard way of expressing disappointments and more, and it has been extended in C++23 with a new interface inspired by functional programming.