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.