Stripped down Status and StatusOr as a standalone library?

[automaciej]

Context: I'm writing some C++ code. My codebase is really small (7k SLOC), and I try to keep my dependencies lean; I build on Linux and macOS, potentially on Windows in the future. For now I only have SDL as a dependency. I don't use CMake (at the time being). I'd love to use Bazel, but I can't seem to build SDL using Bazel, so that's not an option for my project. For now I'm completely happy with a handwritten Makefile.

The main thing I'm missing is Status/StatusOr. The alternatives are kind of clunky; sometimes I use a bool as a return value whether the call was successful. Sometimes I pass in references, I'm experimenting with various approaches, but there really isn't a good substitute for Status and StatusOr.

I wrote a set of GNU Make rules to build Abseil, and I was able to include it in my app. But I realized that pulling in the entirety of Abseil as a dependency of my tiny program is a bit much; if Abseil doesn't build on macOS for example, for whatever reason, I will have a problem.

I'd really like to use Status and StatusOr. I contemplated writing something similar myself, but if the work has already been done in Abseil, it makes a lot of sense to reuse it.

The header files currently pull in a number of dependencies that run relatively deep into the core of Abseil. I tried to identify the minimal set of dependencies, but didn't succeed. I ended up having to compile the entire Abseil.

Could Status and StatusOr be made more modular? Did anyone look into this?

[derekmauro]

We currently don't have any reason to look into making the status library more modular. Nearly all of our programs that use the status library also use its dependencies. We also don't want to guarantee what the dependencies of status are forever as it would hinder library evolution.

If this is really a problem for you, here are a couple ideas:

• Use std::optional instead.
• Use std::expected instead.

If you are having trouble building SDL under Bazel, here are some ideas:

• Use https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_foreign_cc to invoke another build system from Bazel to build SDL.

[automaciej]

Hey, just wanted to thank you for your answer. While it's essentially a "no" to what I asked about, the suggestions for alternatives helped me figure out what to do.

I used std::expected as the return value, and for the error class, I just used a class enum. After some testing I realized I wanted to include a string message with my errors, and I asked ChatGPT to write me a lightweight substitute to absl::Status. That worked well enough.

If I were still at Google I'd have given you a peer bonus. Thanks again for such a kind and helpful answer.

[eugeneo]

Just in case someone needs it, std::expected is C++23 but std::variant is C++17. std::variant<ReturnType, ErrorType> is fairly close to std::expected.