Re: [boost] Re: Survey of Libraries and Visual C++

From: Dejan Jelovic (djelovic_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-01-23 03:15:38

David Wolfram wrote:

> Thank you very much for completing the survey. We are very
> interested in the views, suggestions, and concerns of all users.

Let us ask for more, then :).

We also need better debugger support if we are going to use exceptions
properly.

Basically, the only catch block that I use is catch (...). I place that
anywhere where I start a transaction (a transaction being a windows message
handler, an incoming RPC, etc.), and expect the control to return if
something fails.

Unfortunately, this also catches structured exceptions. So if I mistakenly
use a NULL pointer, the debugger will not inform me about this but will
transfer the control to the catch (...) block. The call stack is lost and
there is not enough information to troubleshoot anymore.

In theory I should be able to catch access violations and other structured
exceptions by using the Debug/Exceptions menu in VC++, but that doesn't work
in practice:

Some applications use structured exceptions as part of their normal routine.
My friend's persistent store uses them, for example. Also I'm told that the
standard COM marshaler uses them.

That means that the Debug/Exceptions menu is not useful as it will give
numerous false alerts.

So what we need is something finely grained. Something like the interactive
bug reporting mechanism in BoundsChecker: This error happened in this
module, this file, this function. Do you want me to report these errors in
the future or ignore them?

Dejan (www.jelovic.com)