Why Use Structured Errors in Rust Applications?

Why Use Structured Errors in Rust Applications? TL;DR I prefer thiserror enums over anyhow , even for application code that simply propagates errors. Custom error types require additional effort, but make the code easier to reason about and maintain down the road. “Using thiserror for libraries and anyhow for applications” In 2025, this is the conventional error handling practice in the Rust community. Let’s quickly recap the main ideas: Libraries should expose error types that provide as much information as possible. This allows the callers to detect and handle specific error conditions. A specific error code is more useful than “Oops, something went wrong”. Structured error types facilitate statically-checked pattern matching, which is more reliable than runtime reflection, downcasting, or regex-matching an error message. They also provide nice autogenerated docs, which is very important for libraries. error types facilitate statically-checked pattern matching, which is more rel ... Read full article.