Google Chrome's mandatory GoogleSoftwareUpdate APT is responsible for a mysterious wave of unbootable Macs (Whoops! Google Says Mysterious Wave of Unbootable Macs Is Their Bad)

Not really. Almost all modern languages have mechanisms to ensure errors can't be ignored by default. If you don't write code to handle the error, either your code won't compile, or it will bomb spectacularly when when the error actually occurs. If you really want to ignore an error, you have to write code that basically says "if an error occurs here, ignore it and keep going".

Unix APIs aren't modern at all, though. Any code that uses them directly tends to be error-prone, which is why most languages don't expose them directly, and instead provide alternatives that make it harder to accidentally do things like ignore error codes. Unfortunately C++ (which is what most of Chrome is written in) is one of the handful of languages where using Unix APIs directly is the norm.

/r/programming Thread Parent Link - gizmodo.com