Kotlin should use the builtin Result type

[Manishearth]

cc @jcrist1 @emarteca

Kotlin has a Result<T> (it's not a Result<T, E>, but it still encapsulates a typed Throwable error)

Is there a reason we can't use it? We should use idiomatic stuff where possible. Is it idiomatic?

https://kotlinlang.org/api/latest/jvm/stdlib/kotlin/-result/

[Manishearth]

If the issue is things not implementing Throwable, you can for now hack around it by having an FFIError<E> that implements Throwable, and in the long term we want to have #446

[jcrist1]

There's no reason not to use it other than the difficulty of making it throwable. I don't know how common Result usage is but I think it's nice to offer the user an idiomatic solution that doesn't require throwing. I tried introducing some types that made the return more rusty, but it seems antithetical to diplomat's philosophy.

I'm going on a two week vacation tomorrow with intermittent rail travel so will be mostly away from the computer except during the longish train rides when I'll probably want to look at this to pass the time. @emarteca if you want to handle this faster, let me know, otherwise I'll see how far I can get on the trains.

[Manishearth]

@jcrist1 do you mean the difficulty of making the error types throwable?

because as I understand it Res doesn't need to be thrown, but I could be wrong

[jcrist1]

@Manishearth Res was a custom type I created just to be rustier in kotlin, and the Err variant didn't need to be throwable. I added the wrapErrAndThrow method to stringly type the error and throw a runtime exception, but it would be nice do something a bit more ergonomic, hopefully leveraging the error trait in rust. Does FFIError leverage the Error trait so we can get access to the debug or display?

[Manishearth]

@jcrist1 FFIError doesn't exist, but it could; it would be a type FFIError<E> that wraps arbitrary errors and is throwable.

However we could also just add #[diplomat::attr(error)] and have kotlin/JS complain when you use an error type that's not marked as such.

[jcrist1]

class FFIError<E>(val er: E): Throwable

Yields

...somelib/src/main/kotlin/dev/diplomattest/somelib/Lib.kt:336:15 Subclass of 'Throwable' may not have type parameters

which is a bummer. But we could instead return a runtime exception with some runtime type info, e.g.

data class FFIError(val errStr: String, val errType: String?) : Throwable("Received error $errStr of type $errType") {
    companion object {
        fun <E>fromE(err:E): FFIError {
            return FFIError(err.toString(), err!!::class.simpleName)
        }
    }
}

[Manishearth]

Ah, okay. Yeah let's just do that for now. I'll try and make the #[diplomat::attr(auto, error)] thing work eventually and I'll let you know when I do