Sweeter Perl exception classes

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I men­tioned at the Ephemeral Miniconf last month that as soon as I write about one Perl mod­ule (or five), some­one inevitably brings up anoth­er (or sev­en) I’ve missed. And of course, it hap­pened again last week: no soon­er had I writ­ten in pass­ing that I was using Exception::Class than the denizens of the Libera Chat IRC #perl chan­nel insist­ed I should use Throwable instead for defin­ing my excep­tions. (I’ve already blogged about var­i­ous ways of catch­ing excep­tions.)

Why Throwable? Aside from Exception::Class’s author rec­om­mend­ing it over his own work due to a ​“nicer, more mod­ern inter­face,” Throwable is a Moo role, so it’s com­pos­able into class­es along with oth­er roles instead of muck­ing about with mul­ti­ple inher­i­tance. This means that if your excep­tions need to do some­thing reusable in your appli­ca­tion like log­ging, you can also con­sume a role that does that and not have so much dupli­cate code. (No, I’m not going to pick a favorite log­ging mod­ule; I’ll prob­a­bly get that wrong too.)

However, since Throwable is a role instead of a class, I would have to define sev­er­al addi­tion­al packages in my tiny mod­uli­no script from last week, one for each excep­tion class I want. The beau­ty of Exception::Class is its sim­ple declar­a­tive nature: just use it and pass a list of desired class names along with options for attrib­ut­es…