The Error type

In addition to the trait Fail, failure provides a type called Error. Any type that implements Fail can be cast into Error using From and Into, which allows users to throw errors using ? which have different types, if the function returns an Error.

For example:

// Something you can deserialize
#[derive(Deserialize)]
struct Object {
    ...
}

impl Object {
    // This throws both IO Errors and JSON Errors, but they both get converted
    // into the Error type.
    fn from_file(path: &Path) -> Result<Object, Error> {
        let mut string = String::new();
        File::open(path)?.read_to_string(&mut string)?;
        let object = json::from_str(&string)?;
        Ok(object)
    }
}

Causes and Backtraces

The Error type has all of the methods from the Fail trait, with a few notable differences. Most importantly, the cause and backtrace methods on Error do not return Options - an Error is guaranteed to have a cause and a backtrace.

// Both methods are guaranteed to return an &Fail and an &Backtrace
println!("{}, {}", error.cause(), error.backtrace())

An Error's cause is always the failure that was cast into this Error. That failure may have further underlying causes. Unlike Fail, this means that the cause of an Error will have the same Display representation as the Error itself.

As to the error's guaranteed backtrace, when the conversion into the Error type happens, if the underlying failure does not provide a backtrace, a new backtrace is constructed pointing to that conversion point (rather than the origin of the error). This construction only happens if there is no underlying backtrace; if it does have a backtrace no new backtrace is constructed.

Downcasting

The Error type also supports downcasting into any concrete Fail type. It can be downcast by reference or by value - when downcasting by value, the return type is Result<T, Error>, allowing you to get the error back out of it.

match error.downcast::<io::Error>() {
    Ok(io_error)    => { ... }
    Err(error)      => { ... }
}

Implementation details

Error is essentially a trait object, but with some fanciness it may generate and store the backtrace if the underlying failure did not have one. In particular, we use a custom dynamically sized type to store the backtrace information inline with the trait object data.

struct Error {
    // Inner<Fail> is a dynamically sized type
    inner: Box<Inner<Fail>>,
}

struct Inner<F: Fail> {
    backtrace: Backtrace,
    failure: F,
}

By storing the backtrace in the heap this way, we avoid increasing the size of the Error type beyond that of two non-nullable pointers. This keeps the size of the Result type from getting too large, avoiding having a negative impact on the “happy path” of returning Ok. For example, a Result<(), Error> should be represented as a pair of nullable pointers, with the null case representing Ok. Similar optimizations can be applied to values up to at least a pointer in size.

To emphasize: Error is intended for use cases where the error case is considered relatively uncommon. This optimization makes the overhead of an error less than it otherwise would be for the Ok branch. In cases where errors are going to be returned extremely frequently, returning this Error type is probably not appropriate, but you should benchmark in those cases.

(As a rule of thumb: if you‘re not sure if you can afford to have a trait object, you probably can afford it. Heap allocations are not nearly as cheap as stack allocations, but they’re cheap enough that you can almost always afford them.)