Why we deprecated Throwables.propagate

Why we deprecated Throwables.propagate

When we deprecate a method, the replacement is often an equivalent method with a new name, or at least it's usually still a one-liner. That's not the case for Throwables.propagate. Its literal replacement is:

throwIfUnchecked(e);
throw new RuntimeException(e);

Inlining that would be fine if propagate were rarely used, but it's not. Internal to Google, for example, it had over 10,000 callers.

Even if the method is only slightly useful, it is used often enough for that to add up. So why did we deprecate it? We found that its average utility in practice was actually slightly negative -- and it's used often enough for that to add up.

Negatives

Can be replaced with a one-liner

We found that 75% of propagate calls passed an argument that was already known to be a checked exception...

try {
  return something(...);
} catch (IOException e) {
  throw Throwables.propagate(e);
}

...which is equivalent to...

try {
  return something(...);
} catch (IOException e) {
  throw new RuntimeException(e);
}

...or an argument that was already known to be an unchecked exception...

try {
  return something(...);
} catch (CancellationException e) {
  throw Throwables.propagate(e);
}

...which is equivalent to...

try {
  return something(...);
} catch (CancellationException e) {
  throw e;
}

...and which, in this particular case, we can simplify further. (See the next section.)

That's not the end of the world, but it means that a majority of calls have no positive value.

Additionally, many of the remaining 25% can get by with throw new RuntimeException(e), too. The downside: If e is a RuntimeException, the call will unnecessarily wrap it. But if it's acceptable to wrap a checked exception into a generic RuntimeException, then it is likely acceptable to do the same for an unchecked exception. (The main case in which wrapping would be undesirable is if there are many nested levels of code that catch Exception and propagate the result.) So some of the remaining 25% of users are getting minimal value, too.

And the second example above hints at how the value becomes negative:

Obscures no-op try-catch

Once we simplified code to...

try {
  return something(...);
} catch (CancellationException e) {
  throw e;
}

...it became obvious that there was no need for the try-catch at all, giving us...

return something(...);

Outsmarts reachability detector

We recommended using propagate as...

throw Throwables.propagate(e);

This way, the compiler knows that execution will never continue after the propagate statement. A lot of people did this, but many did not. We found code like this...

Throwables.propagate(e);
return new MyType<Something>(
    ImmutableList.<Foo>of(),
    ImmutableList.<Bar>of(),
    Something.empty()); // unreachable

The problem can be solved by using throw, but the problem exists in the first place only because of propagate.

(Another problem with propagate and the reachability detector: Sometimes users need to add dummy initial values to variables. This is again fixable by using throw, but users are unlikely to go back and remove the dummy initial values.)

Obscures in general

During our internal migration, we came across code like this. Both the reviewer and I misinterpreted it, believing that our automated refactoring had done the wrong thing.

  try {
    return callable.call();
  } catch (AssertionError e) {
    int delay = retryStrategy.getDelayMillis(tries);
    if (delay >= 0) {
      try {
        Thread.sleep(delay);
      } catch (InterruptedException ie) {
        throw Throwables.propagate(e);
      }
    }
  }

The refactoring changed the propagate call to throw e. This looked like a bug to us: The catch block catches InterruptedException, a checked exception, so we should be wrapping it. But we were wrong: propagate uses e, a parameter from a different catch block, not ie, the InterruptedException.

As usual with confusing code, we can place blame on more than one cause -- including on us, as the code looks obvious to me 4 years later (though that might be because I've simplified the code above). But this kind of confusion is inevitable when we write Throwables.propagate(e) instead of e thousands of times.

propagate is magic

We saw code like this:

try {
  return something(...);
} catch (SomeException e) {
  Throwables.propagate(e);
  log.log(SEVERE, "error", e);
  return default;
}

Someone -- and some reviewer -- thought that propagate did something other than throw. Of course those people are wrong, and every API permits misuse. But it's easy enough to see the reasoning here: Why would Guava have a method that's roughly equivalent to the throw keyword? And if it did, why would it be named "propagate" instead of something with "throw" in the name? (We could help here by renaming the method, but that causes about as much churn as deleting it.)

propagate is magic, part 2

We saw code like this:

private Something foo() throws IOException {
  try {
    return something(...);
  } catch (IOException e) {
    log.log(SEVERE, "error", e);
    Throwables.propagate(e);
  }
}

It seems pretty likely here that the author expected for propagate(e) to rethrow IOException e directly. Maybe that person assumed that propagate looked like this:

<X extends Throwable> void propagate(X x) throws X;

Or maybe that person was just new to Java and didn't think about whether this was even possible.

Or maybe the person really meant the code as it is and just forgot to remove throws IOException. Or maybe not, but the reviewer assumed that that's what happened (and figured it wasn't worth correcting). We don't know because propagate obscures the author's intention.

Encourages unwrapping exceptions from other threads

One common use of Throwables.propagate was to unwrap ExecutionException:

try {
  return cache.get(value);
} catch (ExecutionException e) {
  throw Throwables.propagate(e.getCause());
}

This can produce confusing stack traces. Suppose that one request triggers a cache load, and another request reuses it. If the cache load fails with an unchecked exception, the second request fails with a stack trace from the first.

Of course this is not specific to propagate, but propagate makes it easy. We encourage such users to migrate to Futures.getUnchecked and LoadingCache.getUnchecked, which are designed for exactly this purpose.

(We've found that propagate callers often demonstrate a need for higher-level libraries like this. Another example is Uninterruptibles.)

multicatch is now available, and it's safer

Sometimes people used propagate to avoid code duplication. They'd change this...

public void run() {
  try {
    delegate.run();
  } catch (RuntimeException e) {
    failures.increment();
    throw e;
  } catch (Error e) {
    failures.increment();
    throw e;
  }
}

...to this...

public void run() {
  try {
    delegate.run();
  } catch (Throwable e) {
    failures.increment();
    throw Throwables.propagate(e);
  }
}

Nowdays, they can use multicatch and plain throw:

} catch (RuntimeException | Error e) {

This has the advantage that you can't accidentally catch other kinds of exceptions, as you could with catch (Throwable e)+propagate.

Confusion about the return type

Since propagate is declared to return RuntimeException, a few people assumed that it did. We found code like this...

logAndRethrow(Throwables.propagate(e))

...which will never call logAndRethrow.

More commonly (but still in only ~1% of callers), we saw people define helper methods that called Throwables.propagate and, like it, declared a return value of RuntimeException. This pattern was questionable enough with Throwables.propagate itself: Even though the method is well known, at least a few users were confused, as noted above in this section. It's even more dangerous with the less known, undocumented, poorly named helper methods we saw, like logAndReturn.

Encourages "not caring about failures"

This point is both squishy and controversial. But it became clear that propagate had become something that many people do without thinking about it. That works out OK for many users, but it's not something we like to encourage with a library as widely used as Guava.

What to do

• You can inline the method, of course.
• In many cases, you'll be able to use throw e or throw new RuntimeException(e) with no change in behavior. This sometimes lets you remove other code.
• In some other cases, you can use throw new RuntimeException(e) with an inconsequential change in behavior.
• In still other cases, you may want to look at the higher-level APIs mentioned above.
• You can create your own copy of the method and migrate to that.