ctrl+c and destructors

[Sean Kelly]

On Oct 1, 2013, at 7:30 PM, Walter Bright <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:

> On 10/1/2013 3:37 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> On Tuesday, October 01, 2013 23:17:01 deadalnix wrote:
>>> It shouldn't in a language that have nullable type as default.
>> 
>> I don't see why that's relevant. If you hit a segfault - regardless of whether
>> it's because of a memory corruption or a null pointer or whatever - it's an
>> error that should terminate your program. If we checked for null pointers and
>> threw NullPointerError instead of segfaulting, it would be no different except
>> that it would be an Error being thrown. Both it and segfaults are supposed to
>> kill your program without doing cleanup.
> 
> Right. A null pointer dereference is a logic bug in your program, and hence the program needs to stop immediately, not execute "cleanup" code.
> 
> If there's one notion I'd like to terminate with prejudice, it's the notion that a running program can "recover" from bugs in itself.

I worked on a system whose design was specifically built around trapping and recovering from segfaults (great design, and sadly, patented).  Things like this are one of the primary reasons to use a systems programming language.  So while I agree in the general sense, I don't think it's appropriate for the language to make a hard and fast assertion here.  I think we should choose a reasonable, safe default, but make it overridable.  That's pretty much the design philosophy of Druntime.