Zeuthen: Writing a C library, part 1

Posted Jun 30, 2011 23:44 UTC (Thu) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262)
In reply to: Zeuthen: Writing a C library, part 1 by cmccabe
Parent article: Zeuthen: Writing a C library, part 1

but it won't throw a std::bad_alloc, or any other exception, and you were talking about the dangers of exceptions being thrown from destructors, right? and how you can't do anything useful in a destructor because it might throw, and therefore "look pretty grim for RAII"

(although I'm not sure why you were talking about that, the comment you replied to wasn't talking about exceptions *in* destructors, just exceptions *and* destructors as being helpful for error handling)

Zeuthen: Writing a C library, part 1

Posted Jul 2, 2011 0:20 UTC (Sat) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (1 responses)

I never said that you "couldn't do anything useful in a destructor". Destructors are helpful in general for error handling in C++. I just said that std::bad_alloc is not a great way to handle the failure of small memory allocations.

It is true that printf would get you out of a jam in this case, because it doesn't throw the silly bad_alloc exception when it fails to allocate memory. You could also catch bad_alloc in your destructors whenever it pops up, and try to do something reasonable. In some cases, you can force the nothrow variant of new to be used (although not when std::vector and friends are involved.) But that is going to be very difficult in any non-trivial program.

I get annoyed when people talk about exceptions as a panacea for error handling problems. You don't have to think, just use exceptions, and your problems will magically melt away. The reality is, writing low-level code that correctly handles errors is very difficult in either C or C++. It's simple enough to avoid new and free, but once you start needing to implement transactional behavior-- either a function call succeeds or it fails, but it doesn't leave a mess-- things get difficult.

If you find yourself in a scenario where you have to undo changes that you made earlier to some data structure, your error handling may itself encounter an error. And how do you automatically handle that? Well, you have to engage your brain and structure the operation into a prepare operation followed by a commit operation. And that is not going to be trivial in either C or C++.

Zeuthen: Writing a C library, part 1

Posted Jul 4, 2011 0:11 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

I'm afraid your simple example got much more flak that it deserved. People, it was only an example! The truth is, if I had a dime for every time I have seen something like what you pointed out, I would be rich by now.

The problem with encapsulation (and information hiding in general) is that sometimes you _need_ to take the implementation into account. It doesn't mean that it's not a great engineering principle, it is. It's just that it sometimes makes things complicated. In this case, before you can use something in a destructor you have to be pretty sure that the implementation will not throw an exception. That's not only difficult to do, it's subject to constant change in current development paradigms.

> I get annoyed when people talk about exceptions as a panacea for error handling problems.

Me too. No amount of exceptions, garbage collectors or type inference can replace your brain. They are there you help you with the grunt work, but it doesn't mean you can forget how to properly engineer stuff, because from time to time, you need to.

> It's simple enough to avoid new and free, but once you start needing to implement transactional behavior-- either a function call succeeds or it fails, but it doesn't leave a mess-- things get difficult.

So true. I have come to the conclusion that error handling is maybe 30-50% of the effort needed to get properly done code. And regretfully is often a neglected part. For instance, what you call transactional behavior is called "class invariants" in OO programming. It's critical to well behaved long living programs, but many people haven't head about them (for those: no action should let an object in an inconsistent state).