Skiasharp: Recommended way to do error handling

[UweKeim]

Currently evaluating image libraries to switch to from my current usage of GDI+ (System.Drawing.dll).

Being used to having .NET libraries throw exceptions upon failure, I got really confused to see that SkiaSharp does _not_ follow this .NET pattern.

Methods that can fail seem to return false only, like e.g. SKBitmap.ScalePixels.

In addition I found no way to get extended error messages, once a function fails and returns false.

I would have expected to have at least something similar to Marshal.GetLastWin32Error but again found nothing.

I strongly feel that SkiaSharp is not usable in any medium sized project because of the minimal error reporting. On the other hand, given SkiaSharps popularity, I really do hope, I miss some essential points.

My questions:

1. Can I tell SkiaSharp to throw exceptions instead of C style error reporting (returning booleans)?
2. If not, can I query SkiaSharp to give me more error details than just a boolean?

[mattleibow]

There was some discussion in #1169 about changes, but this is going to be really, really hard:

• we can't do breaking changes
• a duplicate API is not really viable
• starting with exceptions now will be very confusing/unexpected
• runtime flags will have conflicts

[mattleibow]

With regards to the original question:

If not, can I query SkiaSharp to give me more error details than just a boolean?

Often there is no actual data coming from the native API, so this is hard. However, some APIs also have an overload that provides some "result" or "status" value.