dereferencing null

[Martin Nowak]

On Sun, 04 Mar 2012 03:53:53 +0100, Sandeep Datta  
<datta.sandeep at gmail.com> wrote:

>> It's been there for 10 years, and turns out to be a solution looking  
>> for a problem.
>
> I beg to differ, the ability to catch and respond to such asynchronous  
> exceptions is vital to the stable operation of long running software.
>
> It is not hard to see how this can be useful in programs which depend on  
> plugins to extend functionality (e.g. IIS, Visual Studio, OS with  
> drivers as plugins etc). A misbehaving plugin has the potential to bring  
> down the whole house if hardware exceptions cannot be safely handled  
> within the host application. Thus the inability of handling such  
> exceptions undermines D's ability to support dynamically loaded modules  
> of any kind and greatly impairs modularity.
>
A misbehaving plugin could easily corrupt your process. Destroying data
is always much worse than crashing. The only sensible reaction to an async
exception is dumping/tracing. If you want stable plugins you'll have to run
them in another process.