Implementing Plausible Crash Recovery

Landon Fuller:

The  alternative approach, and what is used on Apple’s 64-bit platforms, is the use of so-called zero-cost exceptions. Rather than recording thread state at runtime, the compiler builds a lookup table that covers all codein an executable. This table defines how to accurately unwind a single frame from any valid instruction address, as well as providing language/runtime-specific definitions of where try/catch/finally blocks are defined, and how to handle them.

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As it turns out, this is exactly the same information that debuggers, crash reporters, and evil crash recovery hacks need to perform their own stack unwinding.