assume, assert, enforce, @safe

[Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 29 September 2014 at 13:01:19 UTC, Bruno Medeiros 
wrote:
> On 23/09/2014 19:35, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>>> >it game will crash on ANY bug, it will contain alot less 
>>> >bugs.  'cause
>>> >even the dumbiest QA full of monkeys will not let the game 
>>> >which
>>> >crashes once in a ten seconds to go out of the door.
>
> When doing QA, that's a whole different thing than when playing 
> normally.
>
>> +1. When the game blatantly crashes on every little thing, 
>> there is
>> pressure on the coders to actually fix the problem. Ignored 
>> errors ==
>> convenient excuse for coders to evade work ("it's*only*  a 
>> minor display
>> glitch!", "the deadline's tomorrow, we don't have time to fix 
>> this",
>> "it's 5pm, I need to go home and feed my goldfish", "besides, 
>> it still
>> works anyway, more or less", etc.).
>
> I would invite you to buy a *retail copy* of Elder Scrolls 3 : 
> Morrowind for PC and try playing that. The game did exactly 
> what Walter and you guys suggested: when an assertion tripped, 
> it would crash straight away to the desktop, with only a 
> message dialog saying that an assertion had failed (with info 
> on the source and line of the assertion, and an extra message).
> I couldn't play that game, it would crash too often. And saving 
> wasn't quick enough that I could in practice be manually saving 
> every 15 min. or so.
> Only when several iterations of patches game out, several 
> months after release, did the game become stable enough to be 
> played enjoyably.
> (in fairness, if the assertions where about core game logic, I 
> too would prefer a crash rather then possible corruption of 
> game state. But IIRC there was a few assertions crashes that 
> seemed related to textures, directx, or shader stuff - for that 
> I could have lived without a game crash)
>
> Sometimes even with known bugs the game is shipped, because of 
> management pressure and/or huge delays already. (especially 
> with pressures to do multi-platform releases).

And the right attitude as consumer is to ask for the money back, 
not to wait patiently for the day those bugs eventually get fixed.

If everyone did that, the quality in IT would be much better.

--
Paulo