Miss Dada  🏳️‍⚧️

You'd know exactly where and why it was raised, and you can gracefully report and error and go on with outher work or shut down. The comparison is a bit of a stretch.

My comparison isn't in the type of error, but the fact that either extension (java or c) can cause an error native to that extension type. So the fact that a C extension can segv shouldn't be used as an argument against them. Not all Ruby programmers know Java (as not all know C)

Far more Ruby programmers would know how to handle an exception than a segv.

In practice, though, neither will be handled at the app level if a gem allows either one to affect the dependent app.

One will get a full stack trace in app logs and not interfere with code that doesn't use that extension. The other just explodes.

The stack trace is great for the gem developer who wrote the extension, but it does little for the typical Ruby app developer who doesn’t know Java and is unfamiliar with JRuby internals. And the NPE does affect an entire app if it bubbles up that high.

But you can report it and an ext author can probably find and fix it within minutes. I get what y'all are saying but there's only a limited parallel between segv and NPE here...by design.

I get what you're saying, too, but that parallel is only limited through your perspective. From the PoV of an app developer who doesn't understand the plumbing, a JRuby NPE stack trace and an MRI segv trace are equivalently opaque, and both are readable by ext authors.