Sutter's ISO C++ Trip Report - The best compliment is when someone else steals your ideas....

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, 11 July 2018 23:39:49 MDT Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> On 7/11/2018 6:54 PM, Brad Roberts wrote:
> > Anyway, this is one of the areas where people clearly have different
> > philosophies and changing minds is unlikely to happen.
>
> True, but that doesn't mean each philosophy is equally valid. Some ideas
> are better than others :-)
>
> BTW, the "fail fast with asserts" is one I was pretty much forced into
> with DOS real mode programming, and it has served me well for a very long
> time. It is also based on my experience with Boeing engineering
> philosophy - and that has resulted in incredibly safe airliners.

This discussion reminds me of an interview from Bryan Cantrill a couple of
years back when he was complaining about how Linus was talking about turning
all of the BUG_ONs in the Linux kernel into WARN_ONs, because they were
getting too many crashes, since that's just hiding bugs rather than shoving
them in your face so that you can find them and fix them. Yes, it really
sucks when your program crashes, but if you have a check for invalid state
in your program, you want it to fail fast so that it does not continue to
execute and do who knows what (which is particularly bad for an OS kernel)
and so that you know that it's happening - and preferably have it provide a
core dump so that you hopefully have the information you need to debug it.
Then the problem can be fixed and stop being a problem, reducing the number
of bugs in your program and increasing its stability, whereas if you try to
hide bugs and continue, then you never even find out that it's a problem,
and it doesn't get fixed.

So, there are definitely programmers out there who agree with you even if
there are also plenty out there who don't.

- Jonathan M Davis