dereferencing null

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2012-03-06 02:17, Michel Fortin wrote:
> On 2012-03-05 22:31:34 +0000, "Steven Schveighoffer"
> <schveiguy at yahoo.com> said:
>
>> On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 05:38:20 -0500, Walter Bright
>> <newshound2 at 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.

If possible, it would be nice to have both. If I do have a tool that is 
shorted lived and I'm developing on it, I don't want to have to look up 
the exception in the log files.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg