RFC: Change what assert does on error

[Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole]

On 04/07/2025 9:54 PM, Dennis wrote:
> On Friday, 4 July 2025 at 07:51:00 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> For instance, Timon does this already with programs that actual users 
>> use. It's just that he has to work around the fact that not all of the 
>> clean up code gets run (some of it does, and some of it doesn't), and 
>> the fact that some of the clean up code is skipped means that he's 
>> risking memory safety issues in the process that wouldn't have been 
>> there if the stack had unwound properly. It also potentially means 
>> that he'll miss some of the information that he's trying to log so 
>> that the user can give him that information. And that information is 
>> critical to his ability to fix bugs
> 
> So the argument is that even when you don't recover from Error, it's 
> still desirable to run all (implicit) `finally` blocks when unwinding 
> the stack because that results in a better error log.
> 
> Maybe only Timon can answer this, but what kind of clean up are you 
> doing that makes this important? An example of an error log with and 
> without complete stack unwinding would be illuminating.
> 
> Looking at my own destructors / scope(exit) blocks, they mostly just 
> contain `free`, `fclose`, `CloseHandle`, etc. In that case I agree with 
> Walter: when my program trips an assert, I don't need calls to `free` 
> since that could only lead to more memory corruption, and resource leaks 
> are irrelevant when the program is going to abort shortly.

scope(exit) is ran when Error passes through it.

This is one of the complicating factors at play.