On flatMapThrowing in SwiftNIO
Johannes Weiss
answering
the question why flatMapThrowing
(docs)
is not a throwing flatMap
:
Functions that have this prototype:
f() throws -> EventLoopFuture<Void>
are in my view a bit user hostile. They can fail in two different ways: by throwing [and] by returning a failed future. That means a user needs to look for errors in two different places. […] On top of that: If an asynchronous function throws synchronously, is it really asynchronous?
This one caught me off-guard more than once. Considering the signatures of map
and flatmap
(abridged for brevity):
func map<NewValue>(callback: @escaping (Value) -> NewValue) -> EventLoopFuture<NewValue>
func flatMap<NewValue>(callback: @escaping (Value) -> EventLoopFuture<NewValue>) -> EventLoopFuture<NewValue>
It’s easy to assume that flatMapThrowing
is a version of flatMap
that takes
a throwing closure of type (Value) throws -> EventLoopFuture<NewValue>
. But
that’s not the case.
func flatMapThrowing<NewValue>(callback: @escaping (Value) throws -> NewValue) -> EventLoopFuture<NewValue>
As for the name of the method, Johannes explains:
Lots of people get confused by this, if I could choose again, I’d probably go for something like
combineThrowing
or so?