Re: [boost] Interest check: Boost.Debug

Subject: Re: [boost] Interest check: Boost.Debug
From: Zachary Turner (divisortheory_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-06-02 18:17:25

On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 5:08 PM, Emil Dotchevski <emildotchevski_at_[hidden]>wrote:

>
> Adding stack trace support to Boost Exception was also discussed at
> BoostCon, it would definitely be a nice addition to the rest of the
> information recorded in Boost exceptions automatically by
> BOOST_THROW_EXCEPTION.
>
> I'm guessing that the stack trace information could be stored in
> boost::exception as a little more than just a list of pointers to
> functions, and converted to string at the catch site. Of course this
> support should be kept separate from Boost Exception, IMO a simple
> interface like this would be ideal:
>
> namespace boost
> {
>  namespace debug
>  {
>    class stack_trace;
>    shared_ptr<stack_trace> get_stack_trace();
>    std::string to_string( stack_trace const & );
>  }
> }
>

I do agree that at a bare minimum it should provide a to_string() function,
but actually so much more than this is possible.  The rudimentary support
for this that I've implemented so far already can determine how many
parameters a function has, its return type, the names of the arguments, the
types of the arguments, the values of each parameter.  So it would
definitely be nice to provide iterators for these types of things, and
accessors / enumerations to determine what data type something is, names of
symbols, etc.  This way (among other things, such as the file / line number
/ overloaded new and delete issue I mentioned in the previous post) someone
could provide a custom formatter for a stack trace if they didn't like the
default.