[janm]

The difference between letting an exception bubble up and seeing a system call fail and aborting is pretty small. Either way, you need a higher level way of dealing with it.

One of the most interesting papers I read was "Why computers fail and what we can do about it" by Jim Gray while he was at Tandem. Transactions are essential, and most failures are transient. This can be applied at many levels, and can deal with many failures without the developer of the mainline code having to decide what to do for each given failure.