[OT] OT: Null checks.

[Timon Gehr]

On 5/4/25 08:18, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole wrote:
> On 04/05/2025 5:40 PM, Timon Gehr wrote:
>> The whole: "We really need to make sure people cannot get any 
>> information out of a failing process unless they run the program from 
>> the command line and then we need to make sure nothing but a stack 
>> trace will escape unless we are running in a debugger" is simply not 
>> workable. I don't understand what you are chasing in this instance, 
>> but it is not utility. It almost seems like your only experience with 
>> remote crashes is those that happen frequently and repeatably, and 
>> within a terminal.
> 
> This may be where you need to emphasize that you are talking from a 
> users perspective, not a language developer.
> ...

I am talking from the perspective of a language developer, I just happen 
to actually have also made bad experiences as a user in practice. Note 
that often I lay out a theoretical argument, it is ignored, and a few 
years down the line there are actual users complaining about their 
practical experience. It just seems not everyone is drawing the 
connection between the two.

I don't really like the dynamic where if I lay out the theoretical 
argument people ask for examples, and if I provide examples from my own 
experience, that experience is discounted as somehow being irrelevant in 
the fashion of "you are holding it wrong".

I am sure there is some workaround that will allow me to get more 
information from that user, perhaps I can redirect stderr to a file to 
at least get a stack trace, perhaps not. I will not know whether that 
works until the crash happens again (and I am actually informed that it 
happened). There being more cases that behave like this means there is 
less to go on. For all I know there is a seg fault within a C 
dependency, or it could just be D working against me. Just vastly 
lowering the likelihood that D is the culprit would already help me 
isolate the issue.

> Based upon your other comments, its resulting in some severe problems 
> for you.
> 

Well, Windows users are used to unexplained software failures, and I 
don't know whether a null deference is even the culprit in this case. I 
don't know anything about this particular crash, as it is so rare.

The point is that Walter seems to be moving in the direction of creating 
even more cases where I would not be able to get any information back 
from normie Windows users, while still not acknowledging that segfaults 
are useless and unworkable in practically relevant cases.