When should you prefer Carp and confess, and when should you avoid it?

In Perl, the Carp module provides a way to issue warnings and errors that are more informative than the standard die function. Specifically, using confess allows you to output a stack trace, which can be valuable for debugging. However, there are cases where you may want to avoid using confess, especially in production code or when not all context information is necessary.

When to Use Carp and confess

  • During development to identify issues quickly.
  • When detailed stack traces are beneficial for debugging.
  • In testing environments where visibility into errors is crucial.

When to Avoid It

  • In production code, where verbose error output may expose sensitive information.
  • When performance is a critical concern, as generating stack traces adds overhead.
  • If simpler error handling suffices for the use case.

Example Usage

use Carp qw(confess); sub risky_operation { my $result = eval { # Some risky code die "Something went wrong!"; }; if ($@) { confess("Error occurred during risky operation: $@"); } return $result; }

Perl Carp confess error handling debugging production code stack trace

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