Posts: Reliability

The fallacy of forbidding assertions

There are two ways to handle abnormal conditions in a program: errors and assertions. Errors are a controlled mechanism by which the program propagates details about a faulty condition up the call chain—be it with explicit error return statements or with exceptions. Errors must be used to validate all conditions that might be possible but aren’t valid given the context. Examples include: sanitizing any kind of input (as provided by the user or incoming from the network), and handling error codes from system calls or libraries.

July 24, 2018 · Tags: <a href="/tags/programming">programming</a>, <a href="/tags/reliability">reliability</a>, <a href="/tags/sre">sre</a>
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