I am looking into integrating aborts in the hapijs ecosystem, and find that a standardised AbortError is sorely missing from node. Eg. in @hapi/lab, it would be nice to reliably know when something has errored due to an abort (outside of node APIs).

In browsers this is standardised through new DOMException(message, 'AbortError'), which creates the error with the correct code = 20 property. Of course DOMException support in v17 complicates this further. What will APIs throw?

As it is, I guess we will end up creating our own AbortError class in @hapi/hoek and use it internally.

That is totally fine as long as you have the right .code and .name on it.

I think this is generally okay if people are careful, but I am wary of the fact this ad-hoc approach does make it rather easy for people to footgun, especially if many libraries need to implement their own AbortError. In particular I think these things will be likely footguns:

People won't include .code, this will likely happen as if people are checking .name === "AbortError" today there is a reasonable chance they won't even know about or consider the existence of .code
- Also builtin errors like RangeError, TypeError, and such are only really detectable by .name
People won't include .name, similar to the previous but they're only using .code to check if an error is of a specific kind
The .code property is an inconsistent thing between Node-style errors and DOM-style errors
- For DOMException the .code is always a number, for Node-Style errors .code is a string
- People trying to support both well, essentially can't
- Also JS-errors don't have it at all
The .name property on error subclasses is not automatically derived from the class-name, one actually needs to remember to set it
- i.e. class AbortError extends Error {}; console.log(new AbortError().name) produces Error not AbortError like one might expect
- If the library uses instanceof (or #privField in value) or other such brand-checking internally, then this could easily be overlooked

Uh oh!

Make AbortError public #38361

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