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Error Tracing

Errors implementing ITracedError can have a stack trace in the StackTrace property. To get a stack trace for any error without explicit type checks, use the GetStackTrace extension.

Stack traces are used in DetailedErrorFormatter and DiagnosticErrorFormatter. See Error Formatting for more details.

Most of the errors built in Ferrum have stack trace variants. They collect the stack trace when they are created.

Without stack traceWith stack trace
MessageErrorTracedMessageError
ContextErrorTracedContextError
AggregateErrorTracedAggregateError

You may want to capture stack traces or not depending on environment variables or build type (release/debug). Ferrum does not currently provide default solutions for these scenarios. You can declare your own functions for these purposes.

Capturing stack traces takes time, so use this feature carefully. If the error value returned by a function is intended to be used for branches, and not just returned to the caller, then capturing stack traces can have an impact on performance. In such use cases, the recommendations for using errors with stack traces are the same as for thrown exceptions.

If you implement an error type, you don't need to worry about your error storing a stack trace. Domain errors are weakly dependent on a stack trace. They are usually either handled in code without needing to view the trace, or upcasted to IError and wrapped in a context error that may contain a stack trace. For these reasons, Ferrum's design does not focus on designing errors with stack traces in user space.

But you also shouldn't exclude the possibility of implementing the ITracedError interface if you think it will be useful in a particular case.