Subject: Re: [boost] expected/result/etc
From: Emil Dotchevski (emildotchevski_at_[hidden])
Date: 2016-02-11 17:57:49
On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 9:23 PM, Gavin Lambert <gavinl_at_[hidden]>
wrote:
> 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".)
It appears that you think that C++ exceptions are "unusual" in the same way
OS exceptions are unusual: the OS detected something bad going on and
raises an exception, as many OSes do for example in the case of
dereferencing a null pointer. That's not at all what C++ exceptions are.
They are in fact specifically designed to replace the need to return error
codes, so that handling errors is simpler, safer and more testable.
As for shared_ptr::operator*, I know it could be made to throw, but that
would be incorrect design. I mentioned shared_ptr to make the point that
you're wrong that this kind of design decision can not be made in generic
C++ code. STL too is full of generic functions that throw to indicate a
failure, and others that do not, without giving the user a choice. Even at
the language level, consider that in C++ constructors don't give you the
option to return an error code, the only way for them to fail is by
throwing. Why? Because that is the correct design.
Emil