Hacker News Reader

That’s a good point. I actually modified my comment because I assumed everyone would take for granted that no work should be done in a setter :)

> A function which never returns to the caller doesn't fit into the overall picture.

Hmm, not sure about this. On the node side, you can process.exit() out of a callback. If setting href worked like that, I think it would be less confusing.

View on HN

> If setting href worked like that, I think it would be less confusing.

How do you imagine this would interact with try-finally being used to clean up resources, release locks, close files, and so forth?

try-finally is leaky in JavaScript, in any case. If your `try` block contains an `await` point, its finaliser may never run. The browser also has the right to stop running your tab’s process partway through a JavaScript callback without running any finalisers (for example, because the computer running the browser has been struck by lightning).

For this reason, try-finally is at best a tool for enforcing local invariants in your code. When a function like process.exit() completely retires the current JavaScript environment, there’s no harm in skipping `finally` blocks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com