[REEF-864] Make exception handling consistent

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 0.15
• Component/s: Build infrastructure, Documentation
• Assignee: Sergey Dudoladov
• Reporter: Sergey Dudoladov
• Created: 22/Oct/15 10:08
• Updated: 22/Jun/16 16:07
• Resolved: 07/Apr/16 22:37

Description

The recent OSDI paper suggest that many failures in distributed systems arise from 3 trivial mistake in exception handling:
1) the handler is empty
2) the handler silently aborts
3) the handler contains phrases like “TODO” and “FIXME”, i.e. is knowingly incomplete

The authors propose their own checker for these cases, but we can try to enforce any of these rules via checkstyle, for example.

Issue Links

• is related to: REEF-860 Enable extra sevntu and core checkstyle checks
• is related to: REEF-332 Pass checkstyle
• relates to: REEF-1467 Remove the Exceptions class
• relates to: REEF-1139 Raise a checkstyle warning on calling System.exit()