Interaction of AnkoLogger.error and kotlin.error

Android
1

kotlin.error, in the standard library’s Preconditions.kt, throws an IllegalStateException. It’s very helpful to use. Meanwhile, AnkoLogger.error is a wrapper for Android’s Log.e. I’m finding that I really want to do both of these things at the same time.

My workaround is to have this:

import org.jetbrains.anko.AnkoLogger
import org.jetbrains.anko.error

/**
 * Merge together the functionality of AnkoLogger.error and Kotlin's intrinsic error function,
 * which throws an IllegalStateException
 */
fun AnkoLogger.throwError(message: Any, thr: Throwable? = null) {
    error(message, thr) // AnkoLogger
    kotlin.error(message) // throws IllegalStateException
}

The problem is that, even if you declare this function to be inline, Kotlin treats it differently than a direct call to kotlin.error, where the compiler will infer that the function is never returning, and won’t give you grief about “A return expression required in a function with a body block”. kotlin.error itself works around this by having an internal annotation (@kotlin.internal.InlineOnly) which we’re not allowed to use in our own code.

Any thoughts on this? What’s the right way to have a throwError directive that merges the error reporting and the throwing with the inference that control isn’t coming back to the caller?

2

If your throwError function never returns normally, just tell it to the compiler making its return type to be Nothing:

fun AnkoLogger.throwError(message: Any, thr: Throwable? = null): Nothing {
3

Ahh, I was focused on the inline business rather than the return type. I suppose you could try to work “Nothing type inference” into the Kotlin compiler at some time in the future, but this will certainly do the job for now.

4

On the contrary, Nothing return type is intentionally required to be specified explicitly, even for functions with expression body.

And when you omit return type of a function with a block body it is supposed to be Unit, see https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/functions.html#unit-returning-functions.