Thoughts about D

[Richard Delorme]

On Saturday, 2 December 2017 at 23:44:39 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/2/2017 4:38 AM, Iain Buclaw wrote:
>> But then you need to bloat your program with debug info in 
>> order to
>> understand what, why, and how things went wrong.
>
> Most of the time (for me) that isn't necessary, because the 
> debugger still shows where it failed and that's enough.
>
> Besides, you can always rerun the test case with a debug build.

+1
To me, the current D assert is useless, and I prefer to use a 
C-like equivalent, that "crash" the program without unwinding the 
stack. Then I can inspect the cause of the crash on a debugger, 
with access to the current context (variable contents, etc.), is 
it from a (core file) or by running the program on the debugger. 
That way I do find the bug(s) much faster.  More generally 
treating errors (ie bugs) as unrecoverable exceptions is a 
mistake in IMHO. I prefer a call to the C function abort() that 
leaves the context intact.