Why Letting Your Program Crash Can Be Better Than Catching Exceptions

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Asked By CodeCrusader48 On

I recently came across some code in our production environment that really frustrated me. It contained the typical catch-all exception handling: logging an error and returning false whenever something unexpected happened. This is inside an AWS Lambda function serving as an authorizer for an API gateway. But here's the issue—allowing the Lambda to crash would mean an automatic rejection of the request, which is exactly what I want. Instead, the error is hidden, and I now find myself needing to modify and rebuild the function just to understand what went wrong. What's the point of catching the exception if it provides no helpful information and just leads to more complications? I miss being able to quickly glance at Lambda failures to spot issues; now I have to add extra checks to confirm test success. Why do we keep doing this? Let the program crash!

4 Answers

Answered By LambdaLingo1 On

Sometimes, developers catch broad exceptions without understanding the error. It leads to frustration, as you’ve experienced. The key is to handle known expected exceptions while letting the real unexpected ones surface! Failure needs to be loud and clear so it can be addressed rather than hidden under layers of logs.

Answered By CuriousCoder92 On

I think catching exceptions has its place, but in cases where it's just being logged without recovery actions? That's bad design. Better to let the system crash with clear error logs than to return misleading statuses. Being vague only leads to confusion in debugging later on! Besides, errors should be made known, not concealed.

Answered By Techie123 On

It really depends on the context! Sure, automatically crashing might sound easy, especially for an AWS Lambda handling thousands of requests. For rare exceptions, crashing could be okay because it prevents the whole system from getting muddled with errors. However, many developers just catch everything because they fear outages and prefer to control what goes wrong.

Answered By DevWiseGuy77 On

Totally get where you're coming from! The takeaway here is not to bury exceptions if you can't handle them properly. Just logging and returning false is poor practice. Ideally, when an exception occurs, you should either log it and re-raise or log it and throw a new exception with context. This keeps that crucial stack trace intact so the issue can be diagnosed effectively later. It's all about transparency in debugging, and you're right—hiding errors makes it harder, not easier!

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