Imported From: https://issues.scala-lang.org/browse/SI-5674?orig=1
Reporter: @paulp

@gkossakowski said:
I looked into this ticket one night. We are not that far from being System.exit free. I'll follow up on this some time in a future.

@adriaanm said:
We're currently at:

scala/tools/cmd/Demo.scala:51	      override def errorFn(msg: String) = { println("Error: " + msg) ; sys.exit(0) }
scala/tools/cmd/package.scala:19	    sys.exit(0)
scala/tools/nsc/Driver.scala:68	    sys.exit(if (reporter.hasErrors) 1 else 0)
scala/tools/nsc/MainGenericRunner.scala:106	      sys.exit(1)
scala/tools/nsc/MainTokenMetric.scala:53	    sys.exit(if (reporter.hasErrors) 1 else 0)
scala/tools/nsc/interactive/REPL.scala:66	    /*sys.*/exit(if (reporter.hasErrors) 1 else 0)// Don't use sys yet as this has to run on 2.8.2 also.
scala/tools/nsc/interactive/REPL.scala:189	          exit(1) // Don't use sys yet as this has to run on 2.8.2 also.
scala/tools/nsc/interactive/tests/InteractiveTest.scala:127	    sys.exit(0)
scala/tools/nsc/interactive/tests/Tester.scala:206	    sys.exit(0)
scala/tools/util/SocketServer.scala:21	  def fatal(msg: String) = { warn(msg) ; sys.exit(1) }
scala/tools/util/VerifyClass.scala:51	    System.exit(if(errors.size > 0) 1 else 0)

/me shudders

is there a good samaritan who wants to tackle this?

I could have a look into this.

What does exit get replaced with?

well, that might depend on context. in general compiler code, just throw an exception, e.g. with Global.require. or whatever. there is a lot of diversity in the codebase on this: throw new IllegalArgumentException, throw new IllegalStateException, throw new FatalError, you'll see all sorts of stuff

perhaps there will be cases where there would be room to do even better, e.g. by reporting some kind of proper compiler error? but you needn't go there unless you really feel like it, feel free to scope the issue narrowly. System.exit and sys.exit are so bad that basically anything is better. (just don't launch the proverbial missiles.)

thought: it's conceivable that one or more of the remaining calls is actually legit, like maybe in an fsc context or something? something to keep in mind, but you needn't get paranoid about it

@SethTisue Looking more closely at some of the uses, a lot of them are exit(0), which is supposed to indicate a clean exit; this necessarily cannot be replaced with an exception indicating failure. Should there be a new CleanExit exception (ControlThrowable?), to replace exit(0)? Or something else? In some of these cases (e.g. scala.tools.cmd.runAndExit), it is not possible to merely remove the clean exit, as it actually short-circuits the code.

Edit: scala.tools.cmd.runAndExit is actually the only place I've found which uses exit(0) to short-circuit

@NthPortal sorry but I haven't had time to take a closer look at this and won't this week either. we can look at it on a case-by-case basis on the PR.

@SethTisue No worries

For all of the ones where exit(0) was at the end of a main method, I just removed it. It's really just runAndExit that I'm not sure how to remove