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The nsresult data type is a strongly-typed enum used to represent a value returned by an XPCOM function; these are typically error or status codes. For a list of defined result values, see Error codes returned by Mozilla APIs.
Note: On compilers that do not support strongly-typed enums (that is, compilers that don't support this feature of C++11), it falls back to being an unsigned 32-bit integer, as in past versions of Gecko.
Note: Prior to Gecko 19.0, nsresult was not strongly typed. As a result, it was possible for code to misuse it, such as returning an nsresult value from a function whose signature indicates it returns a boolean.
Because nsresult is strongly typed, code like the following will result in an error at compile time:
bool foo() {
...
if (something) {
return NS_ERROR_FAILURE;
}
...
}