On 2012-03-05 22:31:34 +0000, "Steven Schveighoffer"
<schvei...@yahoo.com> said:
On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 05:38:20 -0500, Walter Bright
<newshou...@digitalmars.com> wrote:
I don't get this at all. I find it trivial to run the program with a debugger:
gdb foo
>run
that's it.
This argument continually irks me to no end. It seems like the trusty
(rusty?) sword you always pull out when defending the current behavior,
but it falls flat on its face when a programmer is faced with a Seg
Fault that has occurred on a program that was running for several
days/weeks, possibly not in his development environment, and now he
must run it via a debugger to wait another several days/weeks to
(hopefully) get the same error.
Please stop using this argument, it's only valid on trivial bugs that
crash immediately during development.
Walter's argument about using gdb doesn't make sense in many scenarios.
He's probably used a little too much to programs which are short lived
and have easily reproducible inputs (like compilers).
That said, throwing an exception might not be a better response all the
time. On my operating system (Mac OS X) when a program crashes I get a
nice crash log with the date, a stack trace for each thread with named
functions, the list of all loaded libraries, and the list of VM regions
dumped into ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/. That's very useful when you
have a customer experiencing a crash with your software, as you can ask
for the crash log. Can't you do the same on other operating systems?
Whereas if an exception is thrown without it being catched I get a
stack trace on the console and nothing else, which is both less
informative an easier to lose than a crash log sitting there on the
disk.
--
Michel Fortin
michel.for...@michelf.com
http://michelf.com/
