[qwertyuiop924]

Integration is all well and good, I suppose. Until you put all your integration into a single process, which will kill your system if it ever crashes. Then I will have some words to say about you. Especially if you ever, ever, EVER, EVER, EVER, use assert, in ANY situation you could ever potentially recover from.

[the_why_of_y]

I disagree with your position on assertions and much prefer Bryan Cantrill's, because it results in bugs actually getting fixed:

  Hope is not a strategy, including for your
  software.  If your state has  become corrupt,
  it is incumbent upon you to die and donate
  your body to science, where it can be
  debugged.

[qwertyuiop924]

Well, yes, in that case you should die, but take steps to make sure that your state doesn't become corrupt in the first place. Like, for instance, doing less, and making your service less complex.

[atemerev]

Why recover if restarting is much simpler? Like in Erlang and Akka, this leads to incredibly reliable systems.

[qwertyuiop924]

But if you're PID 1, you don't have the choice. if you could conceivably recover, you HAVE to try and recover.