Catching a hot potato

[Marco Leise]

Am 17.10.2011, 19:35 Uhr, schrieb Steven Schveighoffer  
<schveiguy at yahoo.com>:

> On Mon, 17 Oct 2011 13:21:39 -0400, Norbert Nemec  
> <Norbert at nemec-online.de> wrote:
>
>> On 17.10.2011 14:54, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>> Your best bet is to close the application, and possibly print a stack
>>> trace. Trying to continue is like continuing to drive when you get a
>>> flat tire. You are just going to keep damaging your car!
>>
>> To stick with this nice analogy:
>>
>> Trying to recover fully from a segfault is indeed like continuing to  
>> ride with a flat tire. Bad idea!
>>
>> Accepting the system default segfault handling is like abandoning the  
>> whole valuable truckload just because of a flat tire. Not such a good  
>> idea either.
>
> Oh, well, that's up to the application design.  I once designed a system  
> backed by a database that could be restarted and using the data in the  
> database could pick up exactly where it left off.  You could call this  
> the AAA of application recovery :)
>
> In many cases, the "valuable truckload" of an application is quickly and  
> easily recreated.
>
>> Sure, an emergency save may fail because of the memory corruption, but  
>> there is a very good chance that it still works because the essential  
>> data structures happen to be unaffected.
>
> Or there's a chance it saves corrupted data, and screws your entire  
> database, or whatever.  It all depends on the situation.  Is it  
> recommended not to catch segfaults?  Definitely.  Should you ever do  
> it?  Maybe, but don't rely on the resulting data for mission critical  
> applications.  The only reason I can see to continue is to try and debug  
> the issue, not to continue running the program.  You're better off  
> designing your application to recover via restarting.
>
> -Steve

If an application tends to crash (like a few versions of Delphi did), an  
auto-save feature will help. If you lose between 1-10 minutes of work at a  
maximum you can probably live with that. I don't think it is a shame if  
the application crashes when it is heavily plugin based. You just need to  
accept and consider that in the application design. OpenOffice has  
auto-save, Eclipse can restore previous installation states (i.e. before  
installing a plugin) etc.