Exceptions

This material was written by Aasmund Eldhuset; it is owned by Khan Academy and is licensed for use under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US. Please note that this is not a part of Khan Academy's official product offering.

Throwing and catching

Exceptions pretty much work like they do in Python. You throw (raise) one with throw:

throw IllegalArgumentException("Value must be positive")

You catch it with try/catch (which corresponds to try/except in Python):

fun divideOrZero(numerator: Int, denominator: Int): Int {
    try {
        return numerator / denominator
    } catch (e: ArithmeticException) {
        return 0
    }
}

The catch blocks are tried in order until an exception type is found that matches the thrown exception (it doesn't need to be an exact match; the thrown exception's class can be a subclass of the declared one), and at most one catch block will be executed. If no match is found, the exception bubbles out of the try/catch.

The finally block (if any) is executed at the end, no matter what the outcome is: either after the try block completes successfully, or after a catch block is executed (even if another exception is thrown by the catch block), or if no matching catch is found.

Unlike Python, try/catch is an expression: the last expression of the try block (if it succeeds) or the chosen catch block becomes the result value (finally doesn't affect the result), so we can refactor the function body above to:

return try {
    numerator / denominator
} catch (e: ArithmeticException) {
    0
}

The base exception class is Throwable (but it is more common to extend its subclass Exception), and there are a ton of built-in exception classes. If you don't find one that match your needs, you can create your own by inheriting from an existing exception class.

Note that exceptions are somewhat discouraged in Kotlin except when interacting with Java code. Instead of throwing exceptions in your own code, consider using special return types like Option or Either from the Arrow library.

Nothing

throw is also an expression, and its return type is the special class Nothing, which does not have any instances. The compiler knows that an expression whose type is Nothing will never return normally, and will therefore generally accept its use even where a different type would normally be required, such as after the Elvis operator. If you make a function that always throws, or that starts an infinite loop, you could declare its return type to be Nothing in order to make the compiler aware of this. One fun example of this is the built-in function TODO, which you can call in any expression (possibly supplying a string argument), and it raises a NotImplementedError.

The nullable version Nothing? will be used by the compiler when something is initialized with null and there is no other type information. In val x = null, the type of x will be Nothing?. This type does not have the "never returns normally" semantics; instead, the compiler knows that the value will always be null.