Imaginary losses [LWN.net]

Imaginary losses

Posted Mar 27, 2008 21:24 UTC (Thu) by wahern (subscriber, #37304)
In reply to: Imaginary losses by pphaneuf
Parent article: Striking gold in binutils

Hmmm, good point. So, if you don't throw from an intermediate function, you compound the
savings.

Well... I guess I'll just call "uncle" at this point. I personally don't like exceptions,
specifically because in my experience letting errors "bubble up" usually means that much error
context is lost, and the programmer gets into the habit of not rigorously handling errors
(that's why, I guess, I didn't think about that pattern). But, in a discussion like this
that's inapplicable.

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Imaginary losses

Posted Mar 27, 2008 22:15 UTC (Thu) by pphaneuf (subscriber, #23480) [Link]

My theory is that you do something about it where you can. If you can't think of something useful to work around the problem, then just let it bubble up, maybe someone who knows better will take care of it, and if not, it'll be the same as an assert.

That's clearly sensible in a lot of cases, because otherwise there would be no such thing as error statuses, they'd just all "handle the errors".

I also quite prefer the default failure mode of a programmer failing to handle an error to be a loud BANG than silently going forward...