A Philosophy of Software Design

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On Monday, 25 May 2026 at 17:26:59 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> I forgot to mention - an out of memory error is nearly always a 
> fatal error for a program. There's no reason one couldn't, when 
> failing to enlarge the string buffer:
> ```
> char* buffer = cast(char*)malloc(newsize);
> if (!buffer)
>     fatal_error("string too big for memory!");
> ```

Ah yes, okay, that's at least better than a cryptic "out of 
memory" error.

> And another problem with exceptions are the "double fault" 
> ones, where an exception is thrown from within an exception. 
> That's a fatal error.

True, although most software I've worked on was written almost 
entirely in Java, with supplementary pieces on Python, Perl, Go, 
Lua, Bash, etc. I think these type of "double fault" exceptions 
are mostly a problem in C++, because the way it does exceptions 
is so convoluted. Most "managed" languages do it differently, and 
IMO better. Java for example uses a similar "chaining" mechanism 
to D, which I've used heavily in a lot of code I've written.