Re: inlinable functions instead of macros

[John Yates <john@yates-sheets.org>]

On Sat, Aug 18, 2012 at 6:15 PM, Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org> wrote:
>
> On Windows, we solved this problem a long time ago by teaching the
> operating system itself how to walk stack frames. When a program
> crashes, the OS captures a minidump containing the faulting stack,
> instruction pointer, register contents, and (optionally) things like
> data segments. If you have one of these minidumps, you don't need
> particularly good assertion-failure output: you have everything you
> need in the minidump, which you can load into the debugger and examine.

And even before that Vax/VMS solved the problem by capturing a stack
trace every time a signal was propagated (including of course ACCVIO
or access violation, the equivalent of SEGV).  A shell setting
controlled whether the trace was displayed by default of not.  Even if
one choose not to display it by default it was always available by
explicit request. VMS coding conventions encouraged failure
notification via signalling and required a signal handler to use a
subsystem specific status when propagating a signal.  This lead to
very informative stack traces consisting of call sites interspersed
with local statuses showing how failure was interpreted and reported
as it propagated up the stack.

/john