need a version of hs_init that returns an error code for command-line errors

This ticket is extracted from Roman's comment in #4464 (closed):

hs_init simply aborts if it doesn't like the RTS arguments which is quite unhelpful for dynamic libraries. I took me a day to find out that an application crash was caused by a failing hs_init (because of the -rtsopts problem). I would like to add a check for this to our code but there doesn't seem to be a way to do this. It would be much nicer if hs_init returned a failure/success code, at least for dynamic libraries.

To which I responded:

If hs_init needs to return an error condition rather than aborting, then we need to define a new API for that, and fix setupRtsFlags. I don't think we need to do this for every case of stg_exit and certainly not for barf: these are all internal error conditions and we have no sensible way to recover.

Trac metadata

Trac field	Value
Version	7.0.3
Type	FeatureRequest
TypeOfFailure	OtherFailure
Priority	normal
Resolution	Unresolved
Component	Runtime System
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