stop

Try to shut down this black box.

Because there might be normal situations where a "black box" isn't viable to cleanly shut down, I'm thinking that letting exceptions be returned instead of thrown will let those situations be distinguished from actual errors.

E.G.: Making an invalid API call to a requests library should still throw the Exception as usual, but making the right call only to find out that the network's down or a process is frozen would be a more "normal" and uncontrollable situation, so in that case the exception should be a return value instead of being thrown.

This way, the entire call stack between where a predictable error happens and where it's eventually handled doesn't have to be wrapped in an overly broad try{} block.

Return

null on success, or an Exception() on failure.