A Philosophy of Software Design

[Meta]

On Monday, 25 May 2026 at 16:41:35 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> 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.

Okay, fair enough. I can't ever recall seeing strings that large 
in source code, so it's probably not a case that you'd ever have 
to worry about, realistically. Still, wouldn't it be better to 
fail compilation with a "string too long" error message instead 
of "out of memory"? It's those weird, very niche corner cases 
where you most want descriptive error messages.