The point of the article, in large part, is that when you’re designing an alternative runtime for a new platform, it is up to you what conditions are considered

The point of the article, in large part, is that when you’re designing an alternative runtime for a new platform, it is up to you what conditions are considered to be errors. Deciding to make a component of the runtime “inert” exists before and above the decision to make the implementation panic. In this specific case: it is up to Microsoft to decide what the semantics of “printing on an Xbox” are. It could be an error; or it could be something that “could be supported in theory in the future, but for now has no way to actually accomplish it.” This is a design choice, not a development choice. After all, in theory, you could print on an Xbox — plug in a USB printer, find a “game” that knows how to print (some enhanced port of a Gameboy game that had GB Printer support, maybe?), and tell it to do so. It’s not necessarily, fundamentally an error that a Xbox game is trying to print. You could define it as an error — but that’s a choice like any other, with trade-offs (in this case, to application portability.) You could define it as asking for the user to choose from no options, as the Xbox actually does. You could have the API lie and say it printed something. You could even actually support printing. These are all choices. It’s only once you’ve made that choice, defining the semantics of “printing on an Xbox” as an error, that it becomes an implementation/debugging problem if that error isn’t thrown — i.e. gets “swallowed.”