On Fri, Aug 31, 2018 at 09:40:50PM +0000, tide via Digitalmars-d wrote: > On Friday, 31 August 2018 at 21:31:02 UTC, 0xEAB wrote: [...] > > Furthermore, how often have we cursed about games that hung up with > > a blackscreen and didn't let us close them by any mean other than > > logging off? If they just crashed, we'd not have run into such > > problems. > > That's assuming an assert catches every error. Not all bugs are going > to be caught by an assert. I don't think I've ever had a game hung up > in a black screen and not be able to close it.
I have, and that's only one of the better possible scenarios. I've had games get into a bad state, which becomes obvious as visual glitches, and then proceed to silently and subtly corrupt the save file so that on next startup all progress is lost. Had the darned thing aborted at the first visual glitch or unexpected internal state, instead of blindly barging on pretending that visual glitches are not a real problem, the save file might have still been salvageable. (Yes, visual glitches, in and of themselves, aren't a big deal. Most people may not even notice them. But when they happen unexpectedly, they can be a symptom of a deeper, far more serious problem. Just like an assert detecting that some variable isn't the expected value. Maybe the variable isn't even anything important; maybe it just controls the color of the title bar or something equally irrelevant. But it could be a sign that there's been a memory corruption. It could be a sign that the program is in the middle of being exploited by a security hack. The unexpected value in the variable isn't merely an irrelevant thing that we can safely ignore; it could be circumstantial evidence of something far more serious. Continuing to barrel forward in spite of clear evidence pointing to a problem is utterly foolish.) T -- Latin's a dead language, as dead as can be; it killed off all the Romans, and now it's killing me! -- Schoolboy
