Re: [boost] Boost debug facilities

From: Yitzhak Sapir (yitzhaks_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-11-04 03:48:13

On Sun, 3 Nov 2002, Darin Adler wrote:

> On Sunday, November 3, 2002, at 02:00  PM, Beman Dawes wrote:
>
> > Surely your debugger allows you to trap the exception at the point it
> > is thrown, so that the stack (and everything else) at that point is
> > available for inspection? Isn't that equivalent to getting a core
> > dump, yet preserves the benefits of exceptions in non-debugging
> > environments?
>
> In the programming environments I use, the debugger allows me to either
> trap all exceptions at the point they are thrown, or none at all. I
> don't know of any environment that lets you express which exceptions
> are expected and which are not.
>
> The problem is that during normal operation of most of my programs,
> occasional exceptions are thrown and caught by code that expects them.
> It's very hard to set up an environment where any exception that
> indicates a programming error will drop into the debugger, but any
> exception that simply indicates an unusual runtime condition will not.
>
> This is a reason I strongly prefer asserts to exceptions to indicate
> programming errors.

On Visual Studio, I can put a breakpoint in the constructor of an
exception by class (such as std::logic_error::logic_error()) (or at the
throw point, if I know from where it will be thrown).  It's also possible
to write a specialized assert macro that does something of the form:

if (!assert_condition) {
  if (::IsDebuggerPresent()) ::DbgBreakpoint();
  else throw exception;
}

It's possible to make it more complex and display a dialog window like
Visual Studio normally does.

Maybe something like that could be added to the boost utility library?