rust-result

More radical approach to Rust's std::result in Python.

Motivation

I do not want exceptions in my code. Rust has this figured out quite neatly by essentially revolving around two pathways for errors: A possible error condition is either one that has no prospect of being handled -- then the program should terminate -- or it is one that could be handled -- then it has to be handled or explicitly ignored.

This concept is replicated here by using AssertionError to emulate Rust's panic!, mapping all unhandled exceptions to AssertionError and providing a Rust-like result type to signal error conditions that do not need to terminate the program.

Documentation

from rust_result import Ok, Err, returns_result

@returns_result()
def read_file():
    with open('/this/path/is/invalid') as f:
        return Ok(f.read())

result = func()

This will raise an AssertionError due to an unhandled exception.

But if you specify the exceptions you expect, you can handle the error:

@returns_result(FileNotFoundError)
def read_file():
    with open('/this/path/is/invalid') as f:
        return Ok(f.read())

result = func()
if result.is_ok():
    print(f'File content: {result.unwrap()}')
else:
    print(f'Error: {result.unwrap_err()}')

Or -- if you are feeling fancy -- you can do pattern matching:

@returns_result(FileNotFoundError)
def read_file():
    with open('/this/path/is/invalid') as f:
        return f.read()

result = read_file()
match result:
    case Ok(v):
        print(f'File content: {v}')
    case Err(e):
        print(f'Error: {e}')

And even fancier:

data = [
    { 'foo': 'value-1' },
    { 'bar': 'value-2' }
]

@returns_result(IndexError, KeyError)
def retrieve_record_entry_backend(index, key):
    return Ok(data[index][key])

def retrieve_record_entry(index, key):
    match retrieve_record_entry_backend(index, key):
        case Ok(v):
            print(f'Retrieved: {v}')
        case Err(IndexError()):
            print(f'No such record: {index}')
        case Err(KeyError()):
            print(f'No entry `{key}` in record {index}')

retrieve_record_entry(2, 'foo')    # No such record: 2
retrieve_record_entry(1, 'foo')    # No entry `foo` in record 1
retrieve_record_entry(1, 'bar')    # Retrieved: value-2

Similar Projects

For a less extreme approach on Rust's result type, see:

• https://github.com/rustedpy/result
• https://github.com/felixhammerl/resultify