Error handling discussion

[martinfouilleul]

Think about better and more systematic error surfacing mechanisms (eg use handles to carry errors / collect errors when we log them and allow to inspect them? etc.)

[bvisness]

This would probably be a good one to discuss in person at a meeting. My general feeling though is that we should come up with an error scheme that can map reasonably well to the richer error-handling schemes in newer programming langauges.

I don't know exactly what that looks like, but having some kind of explicit error types behind the scenes, with some kind of handle system for the C API, seems like it could be a reasonable place to start?