Half-baked thought: Out-of-process asserts

[Neia Neutuladh]

On Tuesday, 4 September 2018 at 03:39:04 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
(Abscissa) wrote:
> Discussion questions:
> - What would be the feasibility of the various parts of this?

You'd need to interrupt the process. You'd need a parent process 
that detects the interrupt. Then you'd need to use the debugger 
API to attach to the child process and get the relevant data.

Annoying to write, but it should work, assuming the child process 
didn't install a signal handler to handle SIGABRT.

You could simply call SIGABRT and create a core dump, but that 
can be costly on a system where your application might use 
multiple gigabytes of RAM.

> - What would be the downsides, and how serious would they be?

It's extra complexity. It means you must run in a multiprocessing 
environment (which is almost, but not quite, a trivial 
requirement). If you're running as a user without debugger 
privileges, you're horked; you aren't getting an error message at 
all.

The benefit is that you can safely do more elaborate logging when 
more of your runtime and base frameworks are in an invalid state. 
I think most people are happy to live dangerously or to go with 
simpler logging.