From owner-freebsd-chat Tue Sep 22 20:51:09 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id UAA19089 for freebsd-chat-outgoing; Tue, 22 Sep 1998 20:51:09 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from obie.softweyr.com ([204.68.178.33]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id UAA18945 for ; Tue, 22 Sep 1998 20:50:14 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from wes@softweyr.com) Received: from softweyr.com (wes@zaphod.softweyr.com [204.68.178.35]) by obie.softweyr.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id VAA00201; Tue, 22 Sep 1998 21:49:46 -0600 (MDT) (envelope-from wes@softweyr.com) Message-ID: <36086FDA.C45D2A46@softweyr.com> Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1998 21:49:46 -0600 From: Wes Peters Organization: Softweyr llc X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.05 [en] (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2.6-RELEASE i386) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Warner Losh CC: Mark Tinguely , freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FYI: function call failures References: <199809221907.OAA07181@plains.NoDak.edu> <199809222301.RAA04905@harmony.village.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message