News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Alan Kay on Messaging (1998) by jacquesm on Monday May 04, 2015 @02:40AM (#9484647)
That's interesting. I guess this boils down to how far from the point of origin a bug originates.

In a message based system that should be at most one step away from where you find the bad value. If it is more than one step away that's more of an architectural issue, it probably means that you are sending your messages first to some kind of hub which then passes it on to the actual recipient so you lose the point of origin information.

A message that gets passed on untransformed from a module that does not realize the data is corrupted is a missed chance for an integrity check and a subsequent crash.

Smalltalk does a half decent job at integrating the 'debugger' with the runtime environment (they're so tightly integrated it's hard to tell where one starts and the other one ends) and allows you to see fairly detailed traces of what happened to which parameter along the way, it's as detailed as any call stack dump.

Erlang has a 'let it crash' policy (see Joe Armstrong's excellent paper) which tries to enforce the point of origin and the subsequent crash happen as close to each other as possible (and provides a whole range of mechanisms to deal with the fall-out).

A 30 level call-stack like say Java would produce simply doesn't happen in those environments. Though if you programmed in a 'Java' style in say 'erlang' then you could generate one and it would make your life much harder.

Re:Alan Kay on Messaging (1998) by Jare on Monday May 04, 2015 @05:39PM (#9489397)
No hehe, my experience is mostly C++ PC and console games, so a) let it crash is not viable, and b) performance precludes performing extensive validation (a debuggable but unresponsive game is not viable).

In games, messaging troubles are usually related to systems like character behaviour and AI that deal with multiple complex entities responding to the world state and interacting with each other. It's rarely a case of corrupt data and null pointers (those are easier): physically valid yet logically incorrect or unexpected data.

Re:Alan Kay on Messaging (1998) by jacquesm on Tuesday May 05, 2015 @03:29AM (#9491295)
I think you're missing out on something, have a read and see if maybe 'let it crash' is more than you think it is:

http://web.archive.org/web/20090430014122/http://nplus1.org/...

https://mazenharake.wordpress.com/2009/09/14/let-it-crash-th...