feat: include .cause stacks in the error stack traces

[voxpelli]

Requirements

• Filling out the template is required. Any pull request that does not include enough information to be reviewed in a timely manner may be closed at the maintainers' discretion.
• All new code requires tests to ensure against regressions.

Description of the Change

Appends the full error stack chain for errors with causes.

Alternate Designs

Prior to the Error cause standardization, there was VError which I did a PR for supporting some years ago #2381. That one as primarily closed because an aversion to supporting random module hooks, which this now being a standard changes.

So I think this is now more a matter of:

• Should this be on by default?
• How should this be formatted?

Why should this be in core?

All current browsers supports this property and Node.js as well since 16.x.

See also eg:

• V8 blog post
• My blog post describing my ponyfill + helpers for it
• pino merging support for it: Serialize err.cause in a nice way when possible pinojs/pino-std-serializers#78

Benefits

Error causes are a great way to enrich errors and to ensure that one can catch all relevant places across an async workflow. See also eg. this old Joyent article explaining how they uses VError.

Possible Drawbacks

• It can become a bit too verbose if a lot of unnecessary causes gets printed, but is that an issue to take into consideration here?

Applicable issues

• This would be a breaking change for everyone that relies on specific stack output for current error object's containing a stack possessing cause property, else it would be a minor. So depends on whether the specific stack output is seen as an API that should be stable or whether it's simply a presentation detail.

Fixes #2735.

[github-actions]

This PR hasn't had any recent activity, and I'm labeling it stale. Remove the label or comment or this PR will be closed in 14 days. Thanks for contributing to Mocha!

[voxpelli]

Still relevant

[ephys]

This PR looks good to me. We'd love for this to land. We had to implement some workarounds in the https://github.com/sequelize/sequelize test suites because our own error messages make heavy use of the cause property and the lack of support for them made them difficult to debug.

[github-actions]

This PR hasn't had any recent activity, and I'm labeling it stale. Remove the label or comment or this PR will be closed in 14 days. Thanks for contributing to Mocha!

[ephys]

Would still love to see this merged

[voxpelli]

Same here

[github-actions]

This PR hasn't had any recent activity, and I'm labeling it stale. Remove the label or comment or this PR will be closed in 14 days. Thanks for contributing to Mocha!

[ephys]

Labeling someone's work as stale because you haven't had time to review is not great :/

[WikiRik]

@juergba would be great if you could take a look at this. Node 16 is the oldest still supported version of Node so there are no supported versions anymore that do not have Error.cause

[github-actions]

This PR hasn't had any recent activity, and I'm labeling it stale. Remove the label or comment or this PR will be closed in 14 days. Thanks for contributing to Mocha!

[voxpelli]

Still a lack of review, not this PR itself being stale

[barak007]

Is this going to be merged? we want to start using the cause field in our errors.

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

🚀 excited to see cause support finally land!

We looked at this as a group, agreed with the general direction. Just a bit of edge case handling needed.