color-eyre VS anyhow

There are crates out there that help you reduce this boiler plate. thiserror is good for creating custom errors and color-eyre or anyhow are good for dynamic errors.

No, that's right! I forgot about that, sorry. I took a look again and the difference seems to be https://docs.rs/eyre/0.6.5/eyre/trait.EyreHandler.html, which allows one to change the way how Errors/Reports are shown. A good example for that is color-eyre.

Definitely more on the application ecosystem side, but I’ve personally found the combination of the tracing (https://tracing-rs.netlify.app/tracing/) crate (especially with liberal use of the instrument macro - https://tracing-rs.netlify.app/tracing/attr.instrument.html ) , color-eyre (https://github.com/yaahc/color-eyre — adding contexts as I bubble up errors ) and then wiring the whole thing up so I get tracing log entries, and spantraces / stacktraces just seems to provide me enough visibility. Most of my code has been running in async/tokio, so I have no idea what the debugging experience would even be across await points.

Another crate to mention - eyre and color-eyre, basically a port of anyhow but a few bells and whistles, and an awesome colored error report formatter.

https://github.com/yaahc/color-eyre

Depending on your use case, thiserror and/or anyhow.

There is ? as well as the anyhow(https://github.com/dtolnay/anyhow) crate that deals with long nested result chains.

There are crates out there that help you reduce this boiler plate. thiserror is good for creating custom errors and color-eyre or anyhow are good for dynamic errors.

Give anyhow a look.

I've brought anyhow::Result into scope, making error handling super easy to use. We don't need to specify all our Error types. It can automatically convert any errors that implement std::error::Error, which should be all of them. If an error propagates all the way up to main(), we'll get all the info it's captured printed to stdout.

Alternatively, if you've got a lot of error types and you're outside a library (so directly in a binary where you don't plan to reuse code elsewhere) you can use anyhow. This gives you an error type you can basically propagate any other error through. On top of that you can attach context information at every return. It's basically a more complicated Result>.

One approach is to define a separate error type for each crate and then use anyhow, eyre or Box to wrap the error, whever a function can return errors originating in several different crates.

Have you tried anyhow and thiserror for making it as simple as .context("Message") or ? to type-convert and propagate errors up the call stack?