Plausible Labs is a software cooperative that writes about Swift, crash reporting, relational programming, and its Mac and iOS work.
Commenters admire it as a worker-owned tech cooperative, though one says it has not invested enough in VoodooPad since buying it.
It's generally easy to catch segfaults. On UNIX-like systems, you can just set a signal handler for SIGSEGV. Other systems generally provide similar functionality.
The problem isn't that they're hard to catch, it's that it's virtually impossible to proceed in any sort of sane manner once a segfault has happened. You have no idea how much state got corrupted before the segfault actually happened. You have no idea what cleanup the functions currently on the stack expect to be able to accomplish before they return. You have no idea what kind of inconsistent state the data structures in memory are in.
If you're really lucky, everything is fine and you can keep on going. If you're not so lucky, stuff is corrupted and you just crash again the moment you try to resume, and again, and again, in an infinite segfault loop. If you're really unlucky, your program doesn't crash again, but proceeds with corrupted data, saving it out to disk and displaying it to the user and causing all sorts of havoc.
I actually helped out a little bit with a similar system:
https://www.plausible.coop/blog/?p=263
Although instead of throwing an exception, it simply tried to proceed to the next instruction.
The whole thing was done as a joke for April Fools' Day, because it's a completely awful idea. Making it throw an exception instead of continuing immediately doesn't really make it better.
I agree in general that segfaults shouldn't exist, but your proposed solution is frightening. Segfaults…
Absolutely. If you want a democratic workplace, form a co-op.
If anyone's interested in reading about cooperativism in the tech world, a starting point is http://techworker.coop/
I can't think of many tech companies that are coops. Plausible Labs, developers of VoodooPad (https://plausible.coop/voodoopad/), is the one that springs to mind first. Most of the other coops I know of are small design/development studios.
Can anyone else name any tech coops?
I've used Voddoopad for years. It was amazing. As a person who organizes content and research based on links instead of folders, its wiki like structure was perfect.
I had high expectations when Gus Mueller sold the app to plausible, but they haven't invested enough on it since 2013.
https://www.plausible.coop/voodoopad
This might be applicable. A software co-operative:
http://www.plausible.coop/blog/?p=25
The biggest problem with the model is financing. You need capital to build something big, and the easiest way to raise a lot of capital is to sell partial ownership of your company.
A consultancy organized along the lines of the Plausible Labs Cooperative. https://plausible.coop/about
You should chat with http://brierwoodapps.com/about-us/ and https://plausible.coop/about