Reply To: Grab bag of questions

The problem that languages have diverse exception semantics, and they make new languages. The best we can do is to provide a general escape that will work with anything (trap to the language runtime system), and primitives that let common idioms be fast and clean.

One-pass unwind is fast and semantically clean, but is hard to debug because when you get to the debugger at the bottom of the stack, the data showing how you got there is gone. Two-pass mostly solves this, but establishing the execution context for a catch predicate halfway down the stack is non-trivial and very language dependent, i.e. will involve language RTS and arbitrary delay that precludes use in the kernel. We hope to give the debugger a command that snapshots the stack before search and then restores it for the real one-pass recovery. However, that’s not implemented yet and in any case won’t work in a running kernel.