Better Native Image Errors

[fniephaus]

TL;DR

We are re-engineering how errors are thrown by GraalVM Native Image to further improve the developer experience.

Goals

Errors thrown by Native Image can sometimes be difficult to understand or even confusing to users. As an AOT compiler, Native Image is a non-trivial system and currently throws many different types of errors.
To further improve the developer experience, we plan to re-engineer how errors are thrown in Native Image and reported to users.
As part of this, we want to make sure that errors are always actionable, help users resolve build-time and run-time problems quicker, make it easier for them to find related issues and report new issues, and re-categorize and re-classify errors, among other efforts.

As an example, we plan to clearly distinguish between user errors (caused by users; need a clear action) and internal errors (caused by Native Image; need to be reported). As another example, the Native Image build process could generate bug reports automatically that users can copy and paste when creating a new issue.

Non-Goals

• Focus exclusively on run-time vs. build-time initialization as we are also advancing the programming model
  (see Advance the Programming Model for Application Initialization at Build Time #4922)
• Stop using GitHub for error reporting and issue tracking

Related Pull Requests

• [GR-41912] More user-friendly reporting of internal errors. #5414