[boost] Boost debug facilities

From: Kevin S. Van Horn (Kevin.VanHorn_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-11-04 10:35:55

Beman Dawes writes:

> 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?

Let's think about this.

First of all, I'm generally only going to be running the program under the 
debugger *after* I have encountered an error.  In regression tests, alpha 
testing and beta testing the program is not going to be run under the 
debugger.

Now, suppose I am running the program under a debugger.  Yes, I can set 
individual breakpoints for all the places where an exception might get 
thrown, but this is a tremendous amount of work, and requires an intimate 
knowledge of the source code, including libraries written by others (e.g., 
Boost libraries).  No, my debugger (gdb) does not have a general facility 
for breakpointing every single place an exception is thrown.  Even if it 
did, this would be unsatisfactory, because I only want to halt and examine 
the program state when an exception indicating a logical error is thrown; 
I don't want to breakpoint on runtime errors.