Back to proposals-2013
Title: Thoughts on Error Handling
Proposer: frank_birbacher
Type: Tutorial
Duration: 90 minutes
Description:
Focusing on C++, but touching also Java and Haskell, the talk reasons
about error handling in general and in C++ in particular. Function
arguments are a central topic as well as limits that we have to deal
with in checking their validity. For that matter, function arguments are
categorized and for each category various possible checks are discussed.
This includes means outside of C++ itself such as dealing with CPU
exceptions, mainly focusing on x86 processors and operating systems. A
comparison to Java shows differences in the duties of the respective
language runtime library. Examples shed light on the question “what is
an error”, “what do we mean by ‘error’”, and “what can we do
about it.” Dealing with those questions the discussion will come to
the conflict of “return values vs. exceptions” and the author's
personal view in this matter: exceptions are good for conditions we
don't handle locally. A short excursion into Haskell territory
introduces the functional concept of monads. Error handling in monads is
compared to exceptions and return codes in C++. After that Abraham's
exception guarantees are explained including their mechanism of safety
and how they lead to canonical implementations of basic object
operations like copy construction and assignment.
Roger: yes
2013:thoughts_on_error_handling
2013/thoughts_on_error_handling.txt · Last modified: 2016/06/11 14:05 by 127.0.0.1