[sup-devel] Strategy for dealing with nil and thread errors

["Edward Z. Yang" <ezyang@MIT.EDU>]

My experience for having run Sup for some appreciable amount of time includes
running into a few Sup exceptions where 'the wrong id is called on some object'
or we attempt to access a field that doesn't exist on nil.  I also have run
into any number of race condition style bugs with respect to threading and the
user interface.

Usually the bugs are kind of harmless, so I just shrug, ignore the UI oddity,
reboot our client, and hope it doesn't come back again.  Sometimes it's really
bad, in which case I might need to reload our index (but usually it goes away
after that) or patch the immediate bit of code that is complaining and hope
I have encouraged some silent corruption.

I was curious if other people have had similar experiences.  I know threading
is fucking hard, and writing code that is robust against internal corruption
(which I assume is the source of nils) is fucking hard, but I think it's a worthy
goal and I think we should be thinking about ways to help rule out these errors
in the Sup codebase.

Cheers,
Edward
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