Joe Armstrong on error handling
November 3, 2020
ยท
1 min readNotes from his GOTO 2018 talk.
What is an error?
A deviation of the program.
Who finds the error?
- Program (runtime)
- Programmer
- Compiler
What should the runtime do?
- Example runtime errors: arithmetic, system, null pointer.
- Crash immediately and assume somebody else will fix the problem.
- It's basically like rebooting the system.
What should the programmer do?
Log it to a stable storage and crash immediately.
Crashing will result end of losing everything for single threaded languages. Talks about concurrent programming.
Where do errors come from?
- Silent errors, doesn't cause program to crash but produces wrong result.
- Programmers may not know how to solve because they don't know there will be an error.