runCatching catches Throwable?

[lawkai]

Hi, in Java, it is generally consider a bad practice to catch Throwable instead of Exception due to Throwable being the super class of Error which represents lower level errors like OutOfMemory etc.
May I know is there any reason why runCatching is catching Throwable instead of Exception?

[michaelbull]

Because that's what Kotlin's own Result type (which came after this library and is far more limited than this library) does.

https://kotlinlang.org/api/latest/jvm/stdlib/kotlin/run-catching.html#runcatching

Calls the specified function block and returns its encapsulated result if invocation was successful, catching any Throwable exception that was thrown from the block function execution and encapsulating it as a failure.

When this library was initially written I had an analogous method named Result.of which used Exception instead of Throwable, but then I deprecated it in favour of a top-level runCatching function to be consistent with how the stdlib operates.