[phobos] Calling abort() on unhandled exception

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Steve Schveighoffer wrote:
> Um, no.  Exceptions can easily be uncaught (oops, forgot a try catch!).  I don't 
> want the end result of an uncaught exception to be a bug that's impossible or 
> difficult to determine because no stack trace was printed.  Let's consider that 
> an exception may not be easily repeated and is most likely encountered by a 
> user, not a developer.  Giving a mechanism to communicate the problem as 
> completely as possible from the user developer should be the default.
> 
> We should classify any exception or error that gets thrown outside of main to be 
> an exception that was not planned for by the developer, and therefore a program 
> error.  This should trigger as much info as possible, definitely including a 
> stack trace, and possibly a core dump (though, dumping core after catching an 
> exception is next to useless).
> 
> If you want to avoid printing stack traces, catch the exception inside of main.  
> I don't think it's too much to ask.

That argument goes both ways, i.e. I could tell you it's not much to ask 
to insert a try/catch if you care about the stack trace.

It comes back to doing a sensible thing by default. main() without a 
try/catch is common in short scripts. I am currently _exceedingly_ happy 
that I'm able to write 10-line scripts that do something interesting and 
behave reasonably in all circumstances. Obviously, a stack trace is not 
something anyone would be interested in for a short script. You are 
saying that I should take a size hit in order to protect you from adding 
6 lines to a 100,000 lines program.

D should be script-friendly, it's a huge boon and a huge appeal, and 
stack traces don't go with script friendliness. Serious programs can 
afford the slight overhead.

See my point?


Andrei