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

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Wednesday, 11 July 2018 at 22:35:06 UTC, crimaniak wrote:
> The people who developed Erlang definitely have a lot of 
> experience developing services.

Yes, it was created for telephone-centrals. You don't want a 
phone central to go completely dead just because there is a bug 
in the code. That would be a disaster. And very dangerous too 
(think emergency calls).

>> The crucial point is whether you can depend on the error being 
>> isolated, as in Erlang's lightweight processes. I guess D 
>> assumes it isn't.
>  I think if we have a task with safe code only, and 
> communication with message passing, it's isolated good enough 
> to make error kill this task only. In any case, I still can 
> drop the whole application myself if I think it will be the 
> more safe way to deal with errors. So paranoids do not lose 
> anything in the case of this approach.

Yup, keep critical code that rarely change, such as committing 
transactions, in a completely separate service and keep 
constantly changing code where bugs will be present separate from 
it.

Anyway, completey idiotic to terminate a productivity application 
because an optional editing function (like a filter in a sound 
editor) generates a division-by-zero. End users would be very 
unhappy.

If people want access to a low-level programming language, then 
they should also be able to control error-handling. Make 
tradeoffs regarding denial-of-service attack-vectors and 100% 
correctness (think servers for entertainment services like game 
servers).

What people completely fail to understand is that if an assert 
trips then it isn't sufficient to reboot the program. So if an 
assert always should lead to shut-down, then it should also 
prevent the program from being run again, using the same line of 
argument. The bug is still there. That means that all bugs leads 
to complete service shutdown, until the bug has been fix, and 
that would make for a very shitty entertainment experience and 
many customers lost.