I have to disgree with that, it's the instant gut ueber-programmer reaction to such problems. Currently the user just gets an exiting emacs, leaving me with no clue as to why emacs exited.
It crashed. It has a bug. What more is there to say? I then have to provide instructions to the user as to how to run the $*&$%#!!! debugger to help me figure out what happened. The debugger that he may or may not have installed, and may or may not even be ABLE to install. Printing a message would not change this situation. Debugging the bug will always require doing these things, and if they can't be done, the bug can't be debugged. A simple last-ditch printf that says "corruption detected during garbage collection, see you later" would be a much easier way to get an initial handle on what the heck the problem is. How would such a message have helped anyone? Practically speaking, I don't see how it would change anything. As it was, without any message, my initial suspicion was a SEGV or similar, which would be much more likely to be a Cygwin problem than an emacs problem. Until the bug is debugged, we know nothing about where the cause lies. The fact that it manifested itself in this way, that it was GC where the bug bit, really tells us nothing. That is why a message would not really help. The visible details of the crash tell us nothing about its cause. It was caused by a long chain of events, and we know nothing about where it started. Any feeling you might get, from such a message, that you know what's going on would be a false feeling. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/