A Philosophy of Software Design

[Walter Bright]

On 5/24/2026 11:15 PM, Meta wrote:
> I dunno, I don't really agree with this point of view. If your software isn't 
> doing proper error handling, then I don't think you're really writing serious 
> software; you're doing toy hobby projects. It'd drive me insane trying to use a 
> compiler that randomly dies in the middle of compilation with only an "out of 
> memory" message to tell me what went wrong. Imagine if all software were written 
> this way - it'd be complete and utter hell.

I never saw it fail in practice. You'd have to write a string that was more than 
64Kb in size (for the PC) and more than a gigabyte (for modern computers). I 
don't think that sort of code would be harboring such a string without the 
programmer knowing about it.


> That exception handling quote from the book seems ridiculous to me as well. I 
> worked in cybersecurity for over 10 years on multi-million LoC SIEM products, 
> huge multi-team, cloud-based, microservice architecture products, enterprise 
> server software... exception handling was never a major source of complexity in 
> any of them.

As I am unfamiliar with your code, I can't have an opinion on it!


> The three major sources of complexity were:
> 
> 1. The business logic of the applications.
> 2. Ensuring the various components were initialized properly, atomically, and in 
> the correct order.
> 3. The enormous tech debt that comes from people doing ugly hacks to get 
> something implemented as quickly as possible, which years down the line become 
> essentially impossible to remove without rewriting huge swathes of code.

Yes, of course!