February 15, 2026
When error handling starts a flamewar
Error payloads in Zig
Zig devs just wanted nicer errors and started a mini language war instead
TLDR: A Zig developer built a fancy system to attach rich data to errors, but the community quickly turned it into a fight over whether Zig’s error handling is broken or brilliant. Fans call it clever, critics say it’s needless complexity proving the language still makes basic failure handling too hard.
A Zig programmer showed off a clever way to pack rich details into error messages, turning boring failures into neatly labeled “diagnostics.” On paper it’s a tidy pattern: you wrap possible problems and their extra info into one container, then pass that around. But the community reaction? Pure chaos.
First, a user strolls in with “page is dead,” setting the tone: impressive idea, terrible presentation. Then comes the big mood: one commenter groans that it’s “annoying that Zig doesn’t properly support payloads in errors,” basically saying, why do we need this wizardry at all if the language did its job? Another jumps straight to the practical nightmare: if you’re stuffing 500 bytes of database error text into this thing, who owns that memory and who cleans it up? Translation: cool pattern, but are we just hiding a ticking time bomb?
The hottest drama spark comes from a commenter who mocks the whole exercise as “instead of learning a new language, I adapted it into something I’m more familiar with,” accusing Zig devs of bending the language into weird shapes just to match their favorite patterns. Meanwhile another asks the heresy question: why not just have normal exceptions and stack traces like other languages? Underneath the snark and jokes, the thread turns into a mini referendum on Zig itself: is this clever engineering… or proof the language still makes error handling way too hard?
Key Points
- •The article proposes a union(enum)-based Diagnostics type per function to carry error payloads in Zig.
- •diagnostics.FromUnion generates a struct that wraps an optional payload and derives an Error set from the union’s enum tags.
- •withContext attaches a payload to an error and returns it, demonstrated with sqlite.ErrorPayload in countRows.
- •A call helper inspects the callee’s signature to create the appropriate Diagnostics, invoke the function, and copy payloads, reducing boilerplate.
- •Payloads are accessible at program edges for logging, and ZLS currently needs explicit type annotations for diag.call results.