On Fri, 1 Dec 2006, Shawn Walker wrote:
Why for the life of me is I cannot understand your library calls abort() to
crash the application because of out of memory
No debugged application on any modern system should ever run out of
memory. Period. Even Microsoft agrees that 16-bit systems are dead and
the corpse is rotting. On non-toy computers, "out of memory" was
something that stopped happening sometime in the 1970s or 1980s.
If a malloc() call fails, the worst thing for the application to do in
such a case is to engage in untested (and likely ill-conceived) recovery
code that probably will make matters worse...including obscuring the place
where the fault occurred.
There is a special place in hell for programmers who do things like
foo = malloc (bar);
if (foo == 0)
return;
Not long ago, I wasted many hours tracking down a bug in a certain program
(name withheld to protect the guilty) that had a bit of code very much
like that above. It miscalculated bar (it was a negative value), and
never did the action which followed that snippet.
or encounter an error from the
server.
I have no idea what you are talking about here. The only abort()s in
c-client are internal consistency checks. Nothing that a server can send
will cause c-client to do an abort().
That is a big no no, please change your library to return a failure
and have the application that is calling your library to deal with errors.
Sorry, but that isn't going to happen. I am not going to revoke an 18
year old old guarantee that certain c-client functions never fail; nor
change the hundreds (if not thousands) of places which rely upon that
guarantee.
If the applications refuses to check for errors, then that is their problem.
No, it's the problem of whomever has to deal with applications that sweep
problems under the rug.
-- Mark --
http://panda.com/mrc
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
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