GenServer.start! and GenServer.start_link!

[Wiebe-Marten Wijnja]

Nearly always, when starting a GenServer (or Agent or ...) from a process (so not inside a supervision tree), 

the process doing the starting does not have a reasonable behaviour to continue in the case that the starting fails

(other than to itself crash).

GenServer.start and GenServer.start_link (and Agent.start, Agent.start_link, etc.) return an `{:ok, pid}` tuple. (or `{:error, info}`)

I am wondering if it would be possible to introduce GenServer.start! and GenServer.start_link! (and item for Agent, ...)

that return just the `pid` (and crash on failure).

The main advantage of this is that start and start_link cannot be incorporated into pipelines, as they return a tuple, whereas

the bang-versions would.

Would this be a good idea, or has a conscious choice been made to not include bang-versions of GenServer.start and GenServer.start_link (and variants)?

[José Valim]

Given most use cases of GenServer/Agent.start_link are to expose similar callbacks through your own modules, I would recommend providing MyApp.Server.start_link! yourself as I don't see many use cases to justify its addition to Elixir.

José Valim

www.plataformatec.com.br

Skype: jv.ptec

Founder and Director of R&D

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