Introducing Plausible Crash Recovery

April 1, 2014, by Landon Fuller

Update: Check out the post-April Fools Follow-up, which delves deeply into the actual implementation of Plausible Crash Recovery, and where this work could actually see practical use.

Sheer performance and deep insight are essential in a crash reporting solution like PLCrashReporter, but our hardcore team is never satisfied by just pushing the envelope — we’re here to destroy it.

Today, I’m extremely pleased to announce the future of iOS and Mac OS crash reporting: Plausible Crash Recovery™.

Plausible Crash Recovery™ works almost by magic, automatically detecting iOS and Mac application crashes, and resuming execution at the next available statement, ensuring that your users never have to deal with a crashed application again. Why just report crashes when you can prevent them?

Crash Recovery is a bit like a time machine, using PLCrashReporter’s best-in-class async-safe stack unwinding to step backwards from the crashing function, restoring non-volatile register state and returning nil to the original caller — think of it like nil messaging on steroids. It truly has to be seen to be believed:

View in HD

Of course, our engineers weren’t satisfied until Plausible Crash Recovery™ handled more fatal signals than any other crash recovery product on the market. NULL dereference? No problem. CFRelease(NULL)? Piece of cake. Sending an Objective-C message to invalid memory? We’ve got you covered.

Developer Preview – Available Today

We could not be happier to get these improvements into the hands of billions of app developers.

If you want to take Plausible Crash Recovery™ for a spin, we’re making it available to early adopters today. Our April 1st preview release contains both the source code to PLCrashReporter with Plausible Crash Recovery™, as well as iOS and Mac OS X demo applications that you can use to test Plausible Crash Recovery™ immediately.

• You can experiment immediately with the Mac OS X Demo.
• See the code in action on your own iOS (and Mac) devices using the Mac and iOS Demo Source Code.
  
• Integrate PLCrashReporter with Plausible Crash Recovery™ in your own applications using the PLCrashReporter Crash Recovery April 1st Preview Release (also on GitHub).

To use PLCrashReporter with Plausible Crash Recovery™ in your own code, simply link against the provided iOS or Mac OS X PLCrashReporter.framework and enable the crash reporter.

Warning: While PLCrashReporter with Plausible Crash Recovery™ does actually work as advertised, it has seen limited testing, and application developers are cautioned to pay close attention to the release date of this announcement prior to shipping PLCrashReporter with Plausible Crash Recovery™ in an actual product.

We also must give credit to Microsoft Visual Basic’s ground-breaking On Error Resume Next, which directly inspired the implementation of PLCrashReporter with Plausible Crash Recovery™.