Go like error handling in TypeScript

In this article we'll learn about how we can handle our errors like Go with TypeScript.

Note: In TypeScript this is probably not a "best practice", or even a good practice at all but let's have fun experimenting nonetheless!

Let's take the following as an example.

import * as fs from 'fs/promises';

async function main(): Promise<void> {
  try {
    const result: Buffer = await fs.readFile('./package.json');
    // Do something with result
  } catch (error) {
    // Handle error
  }
}

main();

In Go, this should look as below.

package main

import "io/ioutil"

func main() {
    data, err := ioutil.ReadFile("./package.json")

    if err != nil {
        // Handle error
    }

    // Do something with data
}

Let's write our async handler helper function! This function basically returns a Tuple of result and error as TypeScript doesn't have multiple returns.

type Maybe<T> = T | null;

type AsyncResult = any;
type AsyncError = any;
type AsyncReturn<R, E> = [Maybe<R>, Maybe<E>];
type AsyncFn = Promise<AsyncResult>;

async function async<R = AsyncResult, E = AsyncError>(
  fn: AsyncFn
): Promise<AsyncReturn<R, E>> {
  try {
    const data: R = await fn;
    return [data, null];
  } catch (error) {
    return [null, error];
  }
}

We can use our async utility as below. We can pass our Result and Error generics types.

import * as fs from 'fs/promises';

async function main(): Promise<void> {
  const fn: Promise<Buffer> = fs.readFile('./package.json');
  const [data, error] = await async<Buffer, NodeJS.ErrnoException>(fn);

  if (error) {
    // Handle error
  }

  // Do something with data
}

main();

Perfect! We now have isolated our try/catch with Go like error handling pattern.

Comments

[Forest Hoffman]

That's a fun exercise! XD

[Gaurav Gupta]

this is a legit pattern, we use this (without typescript) in our codebase to get rid of try catch at the calling site