I agree. One of the advantages of the (err, result) style is that it puts error handling directly in your face. The `result typeof Error` style does not.

In any case all I care about is that we choose one, and (err, result) is gaining traction, which is fine. While many are excited about domains, I am not. From my perspective, in practice, it will just add another incompatible style onto the pile.

Yeah, domains seem like a desperate solution. Will be interesting to see what eventually becomes the standard.

How do you deal with code where the author forgot to handle all of the failure cases and invoke the callback?

To be honest... since you can't try/catch, you can't do much.

You can catch the exception with something like this:

  process.on('uncaughtException', function (err) {
    console.err("Uncaught exception: " + err);
    console.err("Uncaught exception stack: " + err.stack);
  });

I use the built-in clustering module (implementation is very simple) so a simple worker crash will result in the error being logged & the worker being restarted.

That's about the best you can do, unfortunately. You could always monkey patch the lib if you can figure out where it's crashing.

I recommend Longjohn(https://github.com/mattinsler/longjohn) for these sorts of situations; the extra stack trace lines become invaluable.

Fix the code.