Hacker News Reader

To extend that, I don't understand his issue with discarding destructor errors -- most errors I can think of during resource release are mundane (e.g., close(2) returning ECONNRESET) and can safely be ignored. Why not just have `int term();`, which returns the mundane errors, be optional and automatically called from the destructor?

Are there any non-mundane error states that would occur during a stack unwind that you can't safely ignore?

View on HN

Yes actually: proper destruction and cleanup of a mutex must happen, or else a deadlock will likely occur soon.

But proper cleanup of non-mundane issues is a well known problem in all programming languages, C included. If you don't handle the mutex correctly 100% of the time, issues come abound. At least in C++, there is a methodology / philosophy (RAII) that handles most situations.

Depends on your object. Hopefully, no. To build on your example with files, you can get I/O errors (disk full, disk has a hole in it, etc.) while flushing data, if your file is buffered. (Which is the common case.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com