Re: [boost] Re: first sight

From: David Abrahams (david.abrahams_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-01-14 16:22:54

The quoted POSIX rationale seems very similar to the widespread "fear of
exceptions" that was abroad in the land before we understood how to think
about them. It sounds like the POSIX designers weren't confident they could
figure out which operations should give the 'C' equivalent of the nothrow
guarantee, so they threw up their hands. Well, in fairness I think they also
were worried about the vast quantity of legacy 'C' code which doesn't know
how to support cancellation.

I don't think we should approach this problem the same way:

1. We have the tools to think about exception-safety

2. We don't have a lot of legacy code out there already using our library.
If people can't deal with cancellation exceptions, they are free to disable
cancellation at the thread entry point, so they always have a way out.

-Dave

----- Original Message -----
From: "bill_kempf" <williamkempf_at_[hidden]>

Interesting point.  Yet more reasons why I don't want to arbitrarily
add a simple cancellation mechanism.  I'm still learning all of the
perils of cancellation since my platform doesn't support this
concept.  I don't think this is a bad decision, after all, a very
large number of programmers get along quite well with out builtin
cancellation.  In fact, I often get the impression that the Win32
programmers are better off with out cancellation, though I do
understand the desire to include this.

Bill Kempf

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