dereferencing null

[H. S. Teoh]

On Mon, Mar 05, 2012 at 02:50:25AM -0500, Chad J wrote:
[...]
> Problems:
> - I have to rerun the program in a debugger to see the stack trace.

Nope. You can run it on a dumped core.


[...]
> - It only gives one line number.  I imagine there's a way to get it to
> spill the rest?  At least it's the most important line number.
> Nonetheless, I commonly encounter cases where the real action is
> happening a few levels into the stack, which means I want to see ALL
> the line numbers /at one time/.

I use gdc, and it gives a full stack trace with line numbers on pretty
much every line.


> - As I mentioned in another post, it is unreasonable to expect
> others to run your programs in a debugger.  I like it when my users
> can send me stacktraces.  (And they need to have ALL the line
> numbers displayed with no extra coercion.)  There are a number of
> occasions where I don't even need to ask how to reproduce the bug,
> because I can just tell by looking at the trace.  Super useful!
[...]

I guess it depends on your customer base. The customers *my* company
deals with are unlikely to give any more info than "it crashed". (Worse
yet, they have rather odd definitions for the word "crash". I've seen an
actual case where somebody called an unexpected behaviour a "crash",
when it was actually a *correct* program response to wrong user input.)
Most of them have no idea what a stacktrace is... to them it's just some
meaningless crap the computer spews out when something goes wrong --
something you want to get off the screen, out of sight, out of mind,
ASAP.  They have no concept that *somebody* might actually find this
"meaningless" info useful.


T

-- 
2+2=4. 2*2=4. 2^2=4. Therefore, +, *, and ^ are the same operation.