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Date:      Tue, 22 Sep 1998 21:49:46 -0600
From:      Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com>
To:        Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
Cc:        Mark Tinguely <tinguely@plains.NoDak.edu>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: FYI: function call failures
Message-ID:  <36086FDA.C45D2A46@softweyr.com>
References:  <199809221907.OAA07181@plains.NoDak.edu> <199809222301.RAA04905@harmony.village.org>

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Mark Tinguely writes:
: from comp.arch a reference (http://www.ices.cmu.edu/ballista/ftcs98/) to
: a test of function call failures. FreeBSD did not fair too well compared
: to other OSes.
 
Warner Losh wrote:
> Looking at this, they are under the mistaken impression that things
> like strlen(NULL) shouldn't produce a core file.  A robust system
> *WILL* produce a core file to show the developer of his error, rather
> than guess what the right thing to do is.  Also, the code to generate
> the programs used to test things is unavailable.
> 
> Boring and uninteresting, imho.

The poor generation raised on windows don't understand that a UNIX
core dump is *not* the equivalent of the "blue screen of death" on
NT.  A core dump is a *debugging tool.*  It tells you what went wrong,
if not why, and makes it much easier to track down whatever is 
upsetting your program.

We used to ship a GDB executable with every copy of Security 
Toolkit/UNIX, because most of our customers didn't have it installed.
This made it pretty easy to examine the core files, even if we
had the customer driving.  ;^)

-- 
       "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"

Wes Peters                                                 Softweyr LLC
http://www.softweyr.com/~softweyr                      wes@softweyr.com

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