The following paper is a good introduction to some of the issues of writing robust generic components:
D. Abrahams: ``Exception Safety in Generic Components'', originally published in M. Jazayeri, R. Loos, D. Musser (eds.): Generic Programming, Proc. of a Dagstuhl Seminar, Lecture Notes on Computer Science 1766
The simple answer is: ``whenever the semantic and performance characteristics of exceptions are appropriate.''
An oft-cited guideline is to ask yourself the question ``is this an exceptional (or unexpected) situation?'' This guideline has an attractive ring to it, but is usually a mistake. The problem is that one person's ``exceptional'' is another's ``expected'': when you really look at the terms carefully, the distinction evaporates and you're left with no guideline. After all, if you check for an error condition, then in some sense you expect it to happen, or the check is wasted code.
A more appropriate question to ask is: ``do we want stack unwinding here?'' Because actually handling an exception is likely to be significantly slower than executing mainline code, you should also ask: ``Can I afford stack unwinding here?'' For example, a desktop application performing a long computation might periodically check to see whether the user had pressed a cancel button. Throwing an exception could allow the operation to be cancelled gracefully. On the other hand, it would probably be inappropriate to throw and handle exceptions in the inner loop of this computation because that would have a significant performance impact.
As a developer, if I have violated a precondition of a library I'm using, I don't want stack unwinding. What I want is a core dump or the equivalent - a way to inspect the state of the program at the exact point where the problem was detected. That usually means assert() or something like it.
Sometimes it is neccessary to have resilient APIs which can stand up to nearly any kind of client abuse, but there is usually a significant cost to this approach. For example, it usually requires that each object used by a client be tracked so that it can be checked for validity. If you need that sort of protection, it can usually be provided as a layer on top of a simpler API. Beware half-measures, though. An API which promises resilience against some, but not all abuse is an invitation to disaster. Clients will begin to rely on the protection and their expectations will grow to cover unprotected parts of the interface.
Note for Windows developers: unfortunately, the native exception-handling used by most Windows compilers actually throws an exception when you use assert(). Actually, this is true of other programmer errors such as segmentation faults and divide-by-zero errors. One problem with this is that if you use JIT (Just In Time) debugging, there will be collateral exception-unwinding before the debugger comes up. Fortunately, there is a simple but little-known workaround, which is to use the following incantation:
extern "C" void straight_to_debugger(unsigned int, EXCEPTION_POINTERS*)
{
throw;
}
extern "C" void (*old_translator)(unsigned, EXCEPTION_POINTERS*)
= _set_se_translator(straight_to_debugger);
© Copyright David Abrahams 2001. Permission to copy, use, modify, sell and distribute this document is granted provided this copyright notice appears in all copies. This document is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty, and with no claim as to its suitability for any purpose.
Revised 17 August, 2001