alt Hacker NewsThere are a few stages, and each improves on the previous ones:
1. Detect crashes at runtime and by default stop/crash to prevent continuing with invalid program state
2. Detect crashes at runtime and handle them according to the business context (e.g. crash or retry or fallback-to or ...) to prevent bad UX through crashes.
3. Detect potential crashes at compile-time to prevent the dev from forgetting to handle them according to the business context
4. Don't just detect the possibility of crashes but also the specific type and context to prevent the dev from making a logical mistake and causing a potential runtime error during error handling according to the business context
An example for stage 4 would be that the compiler checks that a fall-back option will actually always resolve the errors and not potentially introduce a new error / error type. Such as falling back to another URL does not actually always resolve the problem, there still needs to be handling for when the request to the alternative URL fails.
The philosophy described in the article is basically just stage 1 and a (partial) default restart instead of a default crash, which is maybe a slight improvement but not really sufficient, at least not by my personal standards.
Based on your list there is an opportunity to define stage -1 of error handling sanity, the Eval-Rinse-Reload loop, as implemented by FuckItJS, the original Javascript Error Steamroller: https://github.com/mattdiamond/fuckitjs
> Through a process known as Eval-Rinse-Reload-And-Repeat, FuckItJS repeatedly compiles your code, detecting errors and slicing those lines out of the script. To survive such a violent process, FuckItJS reloads itself after each iteration, allowing the onerror handler to catch every single error in your terribly written code.
> [...]
> This will keep evaluating your code until all errors have been sliced off like mold on a piece of perfectly good bread. Whether or not the remaining code is even worth executing, we don't know. We also don't particularly care.