> What is the difference between building out a stack trace yourself by handling errors manually, and just using exceptions?
You cannot force your dependencies to hand you a stack trace with every error. But in languages that use exceptions a stack trace can be provided for "free" -- not free in runtime cost, but certainly free in development cost.
This one frustrates me a lot. Not getting a proper trace of the lib code that generated an error makes debugging what _exactly_ is going on much more of a PITA. Sure, I can annotate errors in _my_ code all day long, but getting a full trace is a pain.