Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jheriko 4519 days ago
"Check for NULL at beginning of function or blocks which are dereferencing pointers to dynamically allocated memory"

I really strongly disagree with this. Better for it to crash if you expect this memory to always have been allocated. This way you can fix your bug instead of putting your app into some potentially unexpected state... if allocations fail it doesn't make sense to just 'carry on anyway' in many situations.
2 comments
dkersten 4519 days ago
I disagree. Unless you can know for absolute certainty that there is no cleanup required, it is not a good idea to simply crash and leave resources in an inconsistent state.

Otherwise, you need a way for the cleanup code to dispose of the resources and leave the system in a consistent state before crashing.

Ok, its obviously good practice to develop your software in a way that a random outage doesn't leave anything in an inconsistent state, but a lot of software fails to do this. At the very least, you may end up with something like when a server crashes and cannot restart because the port is still considered in use by the OS.

link
jheriko 4517 days ago
if you are writing software which has to have some kind of guaranteed reliability then maybe there is a sort of argument for this - but unless you are handling the failure case in a deterministic and well behaved way then I still think that is a much worse state to be in than a crash. Even in production. In either case you are putting the system in a potentially weird or unrecoverable state - the difference with a hard crash is that you know straight away and its easier to debug, even after its shipped.

Imagine the customer error report or imagine its a critical system and it starts making mistakes...

For most software smoke testing heavily is enough to make it super rock solid. I know that most software does not do this - just using a web browser or a smartphone makes it painfully obvious that even the big software houses have some seriously shoddy practices and that testing gets seriously neglected (it may be that its impractically big... i stuggle to buy that tbh)

link
pfacka 4519 days ago
Noted, thanks, failed allocation is definitely good candidate for fail fast scenario.
link