(Ed. note: This article was originally published on The CUDA Handbook blog on November 2, 2023.)Every API designer has struggled with the question of how best to propagate errors to their callers, since before the term “API” was invented. Even decades ago (say 30+ years), interface designers knew to separate the error return from the payload, in functions that return other results to their caller.Since it is sometimes useful to know what not to do: My favorite example of an antipattern in this d...