Andreas Kling on the cost of patterns

~2 years ago I became convinced that meticulously checking every heap allocation for failure would lead to robust GUI applications that don't fall apart under resource pressure.

Fast-forward to today, we have made the SerenityOS codebase significantly uglier and less pleasant to work on as a direct result of pursuing this goal.

At the same time, the sought-after robustness remains a hypothetical mirage.

It's time to admit I was wrong about this. Not because it's impossible, but because it's costing us way more than it's giving us.

On reflection, I believe the main mistake here was adopting the meticulous checks wholesale across the entire operating system. It should have instead been limited to specific, critical services and libraries.

Adopting new patterns is easy. Admitting that you adopted the wrong pattern and reversing course is harder. However, I now believe we need to walk backwards a bit to make GUI programming on SerenityOS fun again.

in a tweet, via jado. I again miss twitter, and am sad for the good stuff that's getting posted there that I can't see any longer.

It is really hard to admit that a pattern you've followed such as this is not worth the benefit, and it's even harder to back it out without losing coherence in a large codebase.