Again, on z/OS, this is a solved problem. If the application runs inside an "application server", for instance CICS, you can still get the dump and the CICS can

Again, on z/OS, this is a solved problem. If the application runs inside an "application server", for instance CICS, you can still get the dump and the CICS can continue or even restart your app (or it can be restarted through other things). You can get the dump of the process even if just one thread will fail. I know from experience on z/OS how useful full dump can be, and I sorely miss it in Java. You wouldn't have to read the full dump yourself - a good postmortem debugger can do that work for you - displaying stack trace, locals, etc. Good logs can certainly save you.. if you have them, and you happen to log exactly what you need. But it's much easier to look at the memory and see what went wrong. (Personally, I think logs are great on the boundary, to describe inputs and outputs.) I also think that the exceptions are kind of wrong approach (compared to z/OS ABEND conditions), and it's not entirely true that failing loudly is a bad practice, but that's for another discussion.