Because programs that crash are not necessarily in a consistent state, so
crash recovery can fail where ordinary bootups do not. (Of course, if you
can make crash recovery reliable with something like application-level
journalling, your point stands, unless like databases the post-crash
bootup is really expensive. But that's probably a rare case.)
Posted Sep 25, 2008 14:59 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625)
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Programs that come back in a messed-up state after a crash make baby Jesus cry. The vi clone "elvis" had good recovery very early, and we have enough disk space now to do it even for very large media files.
A user actions log that an app could replay might have other uses, too. Of course there's deep undo and bug reporting, and automatic macro writing by identifying common steps might be useful. There was even a legal case a few years ago where a composer couldn't prove he had created a certain audio file, because he couldn't put the sliders of his GUI audio app on the exact right pixel.