CppCon 2018

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 disappointments.

In some cases we can use exceptions. But there are many cases where the overhead of exceptions is more than we want or can afford - and some are so constrained that exceptions are not even possible. Alternatives now include std::optional, or the proposed std::expected - but these come with a lot of code overhead

What we really want is a way to concisely produce and handle disappointments in our code in a performant manner. This talk will evaluate a few approaches to solving this, including monads, syntactic sugar for error handling, and we'll even look at an intriguing possibility that promises to unify these worlds.