Couldn't we just clear it instead?

@filmor that would be silent information loss.

This way will probably lead to a lot more unwanted behaviour in that a program that ends withShutdown will not have its resources closed if an error is still set (as it will just crash on this exception), or am I misunderstanding something?

@filmor if they are at this point, they already have an unhandled exception. Generally speaking it is better to crash, than to try to close resources as you might persist a corrupted state and not get notified about it at all.

Hmm, I'll tentatively agree with this, let's see whether someone complains :)