[armedbear-devel] Serious bug involving UWP

[Mark Evenson]

On 9/17/09 10:36 PM, Tobias C. Rittweiler wrote:

> There is another issue I'd like to raise.
>
>      The reason for the funny behaviour, and why it consumed a lot of
>      time to track this bug down is because there's no global handler
>      which prints a Stack Trace for uncaught Exceptions.
>
>      Instead of such a global handler, local "catch (...) { Debug.Trace
>      ... }" are sprinkled all over the code base. And, obviously, they're
>      easy to miss---as it has been the case here.
>
>      So the exception is swept under the carpet and ABCL seems to unwind
>      the stack to some safe point, probably the toplevel, and proceed
>      from there.

Acknowledged.

The current codebase seemingly suffers from a lack of a coherent plan 
for how to deal with exceptions, at least to my understanding of it.  I 
think the use of 'org.armedbear.lisp.ConditionThrowable' subclassing 
'java.lang.Throwable' should be reconsidered, to make more consistent 
use of the [exception chaining mechanism introduced in Java 1.4][1].

But going through the code to remove all the instances of swallowing 
exceptions to at least print diagnostic information should be rather 
easily gathered low hanging fruit.


[1]: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/lang/Throwable.html
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