Presentation: "Let It Crash...Except When You Shouldn't"
Time: Thursday 14:05 - 15:05
Location: St James’s Suite, Fourth Floor
Erlang is well known for its "let it crash" philosophy for dealing with errors, where handling specific errors is generally avoided in favor of having hierarchical process supervisors restart any failed processes. This works surprisingly well, allowing developers to pay little attention to error handling and yet still create Erlang applications providing high availability and uptime.
Still, blindly just letting things crash can sometimes result in undesirable client-visible service failures and outages. Achieving even higher levels of availability means avoiding crashes for some types of errors and deciding specifically when and how to crash for the rest. In this talk, Steve takes a detailed look at common types of Erlang errors that can be avoided and how to steer clear of them while still adhering to the "let it crash" philosophy.