Sheriff

Sheriff is a simple low-overhead header-only library for ground-level error handling/debugging made for c++17 and up.

DISCLAIMER: This project is still pretty bare bones, and will improve over time!

What does it do?

The way Sheriff aims to help with debugging, is by giving integer return types more meaning. Something you were always able to do is to return a member of an enum as an error code.
What Sheriff does is make this process more user friendly.

class Test
{
public:
	enum Errors : int32_t {
		NONE = 0,
		UNDEFINED = 1,
		SOME_THING = 2,
		SOME_THING_ELSE = 3,
	};

	shf::Territory shfTerritory = shf::Territory("Test");

	shf::RetV test()
	{
		// execute some code
		return shf::RetV(shfTerritory, SOME_THING);
	}
};

What you see here is how you would implement Sheriff into any class. You first off create a shf::Territory which holds the name of the class(passed in as argument 1) and the no-error code(as the 2nd argument), which is the return code for when no error occured. Any function/method that would normally return an integer error code will now return a shf::RetV(shf::ReturnValue).
The first argument to the shf::RetV is a reference to the respective shf::Territory, and the 2nd one the Error Code. I stored them as an enum for ease of use.

The return code can either be accessed by accessing the public member m_value or using the int() operator.
The same for the Territory (in this case the p_territory public member). Though the class name given to the territory can also be accessed with the const char*() operator.
A shf::ReturnValue can also be read as a boolean (true if no error occured) via the bool() operator.

In practice this isn't even required to know though. Because most of the time this is how you deal with errors:

IF_SHF_ERR(t.test())
	{
		shf::PrintErr(err);
    		// do some error handling
		return -1;
	}

IF_SHF_ERR() is a macro definition which expands to if (shf::RetV err = t.test(); !err) in this case, allowing for a block afterwards, and providing access to the error for handling.

Also a last thing to mention is, shf::PrintErr is a std::function, so it can easily be overridden for usage with a logger, or just changing the output formatting.

The Full example program

#include "sheriff-base.h"

class Test
{
public:
	enum Errors : int32_t {
		NONE = 0,
		UNDEFINED = 1,
		SOME_THING = 2,
		SOME_THING_ELSE = 3,
	};

	shf::Territory shfTerritory = shf::Territory("Test");

	shf::RetV test()
	{
		// execute some code
		return shf::RetV(shfTerritory, SOME_THING);
	}
};

shf::Territory shfTerriory = shf::Territory("Main");

int main()
{
	Test t;

	IF_SHF_ERR(t.test())
	{
		shf::PrintErr(err);
		return -1;
	}

	return 0;
} 

The shf::Territory in global scope in unneeded here.