RFC: Change what assert does on error

[Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole]

On 05/07/2025 6:57 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Friday, July 4, 2025 5:09:27 PM Mountain Daylight Time Timon Gehr via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
> 
> 
>     A destructor can do anything, not just call |free|. Not calling them
>     is way more likely to leave behind an unexpected state than even the
>     original error condition. The state can be perfectly fine, it's just
>     that the code that attempted to operate on it may be buggy.
> 
> 
> This is particularly true if RAII is used. For instance, the way that 
> MFC implemented turning the cursor into an hourglass was with RAII, so 
> that you just declared the thing, so when the variable was created, the 
> cursor turned into an hourglass, and when the scope exited, the variable 
> was destroyed, and the cursor went back to normal.
> 
> 
> RAII is used less in D than in C++ (if nothing else, because we have 
> scope statements), but it's a design pattern that D supports, and 
> programmers can use it for all kinds of stuff that has absolutely 
> nothing to do with memory allocations.

Don't forget there is also COM, which if not cleaned up properly will 
affect other processes including the Windows shell itself.