Subject: Re: [boost] expected/result/etc
From: Gavin Lambert (gavinl_at_[hidden])
Date: 2016-02-11 00:23:10
On 11/02/2016 15:08, Emil Dotchevski wrote:
> Dereferencing a null shared_ptr is something that easily could happen at
> runtime. Are you saying that it shouldn't assert in this case? Are you
> saying that that assert is useless? Are you saying that the correct design
> is to throw? Or is the correct design to assert and throw?
I answered that in the next paragraph:
On 11/02/2016 14:11, I wrote:
> You could assert *and* throw (or abort, if you don't know how to
> recover from it), although arguably the assert is less useful if
> you're repeating the same condition outside the assert anyway. But
> you can't just slap an assert in and call it a day, at least not for
> this sort of condition.
Or you could just throw. I'm not convinced that the assert itself adds
any particular value, aside from possibly being more in-your-face when
running a debug build. (But thrown exceptions can be equally in your
face in both debug and release builds if you have a debugger attached,
and if throwing exceptions is unusual so you haven't disabled "break on
exception throw".)