anyhow is the most commonly used crate to have type erased errors(1), nothing more then that but also nothing less
this means when returned form a library a Result<_, anyhow::Error> _is often an anti-pattern_ (often not always!)
but if you write an application it's pretty common to have many many places in the code where you can be sure that no upstream code needs more fine grained error handling (because you workspace is the most upstream code) so using anyhow is a pretty common and convenient choice
Though it's not unlikely for anyhow to fade into being mostly unused in the future with further currently missing rustc/std features, through not anytime soon.
But luckily this doesn't matter, due to how `?` works you can trivially convert errors on the fly no matter which (well kinda, there is an unlucky overlap between orphan rules and From wildcard implementations in the anyhow crate, but we can ignore that for this discussion).
(1): It's basically a form of Box<dyn Error + Send + Sync + 'static> which also has thin pointer optimizations and (can) by default include a stack trace + some convenience methods.
Sure, but the question was specifically looking for the "minimum effort" solution. I almost brought up thiserror but that just makes things more complicated. If you're writing a Rust application and just want to propagate errors, anyhow is currently the most popular way to do that.
anyhow is for type erased errors, which is mainly used for the kind of errors you mainly propagate upward without handling them in any fine grained way. It's mainly used in applications (instead of libraries). For example in a web server anyhow errors will likely yield Internal Serer errors.
thiserror provides a derive (codegen) to easily create your own error. It's much more often used by libraries, but if an application doesn't want to handle this errors they will likely be converted into anyhow errors. A very common use case is to apply it on an enum which represent "one of many errors" e.g. as a dump example `enum Error { BadArgument(...), ConstraintViolation(...), ... }` and it's no absurd in some cases to have a mixture e.g. an enum variant `Unexpected(anyhow::Error)` which represents various very unpexted errors which likely could be bugs and you might have considered panicing there but decided to propagate them instead to avoid panic related problems
I don't understand why this answer is buried deep in a thread & isn't included in the Rust Book, even though it's been conventional wisdom among experienced Rustaceans for a few years now.
Download counts don't mean very much here as I'm fairly sure both crates are common transitive dependencies. Or in other words, millions of programmers aren't individually choosing Anyhow or Thiserror on a monthly basis -- they're just dependencies of other rust crates or apps.
And agreeing with the other reply, nobody jumps up and down with joy when choosing an error handling crate. You pick the right poison for the job and try not to shed a tear for code beauty as you add in error handling.
