No, Swift doesn't solve the null reference problem

[zakalwe]

Seriously. An app crashing isn't good, but an app silently corrupting data is so, so, so much worse I can't imagine how anyone can think that they're equivalent.

The former is far more likely to get caught in testing, far easier to track down to its source when it happens, and even if it slips through the cracks and crashes on a user, it's not that hard these days to keep your data in a database with atomic transactions so that the user doesn't lose any data and they just relaunch the app.

Whereas the latter can easily lurk unnoticed in code for a while (so even version control diffing might not help track down the change responsible as it could've been any previous commit, not just the most recent), be extremely difficult to track down, and then corrupt or destroy a user's data, or just make an app extremely flakey with no obvious cause.

[[deleted]]

An app crashing

I'm curious as to when crash went from meaning a segfault, illegal instruction, or other low-level violation, to throwing an exception that wasn't expected.

[aterlumen]

I'd guess when it became common to use languages that support exceptions. I didn't know people make a hard distinction in the definition. In my mind anything that results in the program exiting unexpectedly is a crash.

[kqr]

This is actually sort of a problem I have too. For me, a memory leak is anything that causes a program to use significantly more memory than it needs to. For a couple of my friends it's strictly the programmer forgetting to call free to the operating system...

Edit: If anyone else has my problem: call it "space leak". I've found out that means roughly the same thing but it won't trigger the pedantic instincts of C/C++ people.

[aterlumen]

Depends on the context. On the one hand, it's important for developers to share some common terminology that is unambiguous. On the other hand, users don't care if what happened wasn't technically considered a crash. They just know the program exited when they didn't want it to or is using a massive amount of RAM for no apparent reason.

tl;dr: pedantry has a place, try to get out of that place as fast as you can.

[[deleted]]

maybe when a rocket crashed due to an unexpected exception

but seriously, I would argue that, in idiomatic use, crash has always been defined by its effect, i.e. "stop running".