How to manage unhandled exceptions?
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The bad news is, that you need a
@
try {
...
} catch (...) {
...
}
@around everything you expect to throw. The good news is, that you'll almost never need this, because Qt classes themselves don't throw.
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Whenever I see
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} catch (...) {
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I smell a bug-report coming soon and usually I'm right. It's a very good indicator of a certain way of thinking: "I don't know what this stuff does but it crashes my app so I'll just catch anything it throws at me, ignore it, and pretend nothing happened." otherwise known as "I'll sweep it under a rug and see if anybody notices. If not then I consider it fixed".It's a kind of "philosophical dilemma":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest ;)
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.. and it's definitely a good starting point for a major flamewar :-D
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Good point. I'm shutting up now :)
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Null pointer dereference is a software bug. You should not catch it. You should let it crash during testing and fix the bug. Use assert().
If allowing a null value is part of your design (perfectly valid sometimes) then you should test the pointer before using it.
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Okay, you're right. But i'm now releasing my application. It contain a simple http server, that must be always active! I prefer to ensure that the server remains active and continuing to provide http services, although there are bugs.
It's too weird?
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So your question basically is: "I wrote a buggy software. How can I make it work without fixing it?"
My answer is: "Sorry, I can't help you" ;)[EDIT]: To give you a little more constructive answer: If you don't have comprehensive testing suite use some static analysis tool like "cppcheck":http://cppcheck.sourceforge.net/ It's very good at finding this kind of bugs so you should be able to detect and fix them quicker.
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The best technical solution is to fix the bugs. As I mentioned earlier - you can surround your code with try/catch and ignore such errors, but they will often lead to more serious problems like data corruption or security vulnerabilities (e.g. writing out of array bounds, uninitialized variables pointing to "secret" data and many others). Considering your software is an http server I'm guessing that's not something you want to risk.
In any case I wouldn't risk keeping such software running after a failure occurs. The state it's in is indeterminable. Just let it crash (log stuff if you can but crash anyway).
A crude workaround is to create a service that would monitor if your server is running and restart it when it crashes. It's a little like putting a band-aid on a broken leg but might be a temporary solution until you can fix the soft. -
Ok Chris, I try to explain better.
I'm new with Qt.
With other languages (ie. C#, Java, Javascript also) you can catch and manage exceptions like null pointer reference, and so on.How in Qt? Is possible or not?? This is my question.
This code doesn't works.
@try {
QJsonObject *o = NULL;
qDebug()<<o->empty();
}
catch(std::exception ex) {
// don't catch!!!
}
catch(...) {
// don't catch!!!
}@The reply may be simple:
- NO, no solution for you :( Qt is unable to catch this.
- YES, this is solution :) ...............
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The reply is: NOne of these apply ;) Or in other words: yes and no. You can do it but you never should.
bq. How in Qt? Is possible or not?? This is my question.
I can only repeat until you get it - Qt doesn't throw exceptions. Also, your example has nothing to do with Qt. You could change QJsonObject to Foo and it would still be the same case. The only exception thrown here would be (if it's enabled by compiler switches) by the platform runtime, not Qt.
There is no null pointer exception in c++ language. Dereferencing a null pointer is a software bug in c++, an undefined behavior and you can't reliably catch it (apart from platform specific runtime extensions). You should never try it because there's no virtual machine that will save you like in java or sandbox like in javascript.
The proper way to do this in c++ is:
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QJsonObject* object = //get it from somewhere
if(object)
qDebug() << object->empty();
@
