I understand perfectly well what you’ve said, and I don’t disagree with any of it. The point I’m trying to make (badly, apparently) is not that.
My point (and I believe the point of the linked article, and, I mistakenly thought, my original comment) is that decisions by a few can have enormous impacts on the productivity of many, including design decisions like “should we bother polishing the errors from these corner cases at the expense of delaying new feature work, or just let people report a bug if they run into a corner case and get on with new features?” Rui chose to group a whole swath of errors in lld into the “not worth polishing” category so they could move on with more important work.
My apologies that my point somehow came across as “always crash your program, never throw exceptions!” Thanks for your patience and taking the time to read generously and deeply and to really understand my point.
I apologize for my impatience. The original description really could plausibly be read to suggest he did not even check for bad input, and just assumed input was OK, maybe with assertions that would run in debug builds. It is true that not even coding sanity checks is less work than arranging to abort or throw, and marginally faster.
Producing faulty output is a more likely response to unchecked faulty input than crashing. It would have been better for the author to mention that, if true.
I understand perfectly well what you’ve said, and I don’t disagree with any of it. The point I’m trying to make (badly, apparently) is not that.
My point (and I believe the point of the linked article, and, I mistakenly thought, my original comment) is that decisions by a few can have enormous impacts on the productivity of many, including design decisions like “should we bother polishing the errors from these corner cases at the expense of delaying new feature work, or just let people report a bug if they run into a corner case and get on with new features?” Rui chose to group a whole swath of errors in lld into the “not worth polishing” category so they could move on with more important work.
My apologies that my point somehow came across as “always crash your program, never throw exceptions!” Thanks for your patience and taking the time to read generously and deeply and to really understand my point.