Error Handling

An idiom is an architectural or design pattern implementation in a concrete programming language. Applying them is idiomatic for a programming language. Today. I write about the Copy-and-Swap Idiom in C++. This idiom gives you the strong exception safety guarantee.

The C++ core guidelines use the term string as a sequence of characters. Consequently, the guidelines are about  C-strings, C++-strings, the C++17 std::string_view's, and std::byte's. 

If you can't throw an exception and can't use final_action (finally) from the guideline support library, you have a problem. Exceptional states require exceptional actions: goto. Really?

To make my point clear, this post is about the exceptional case that you can not throw an exception. If your program runs in a restricted embedded environment or you have to fulfil a hard-real-time requirement, this situation may be not so exceptional to you.

Today's post is about the right way to throw and catch exceptions. This means when you should throw and how you should catch an exception.

If you skim the remaining rules to error handling, you often read the word noexcept. Before I write about the rules for error handling, I will write about the noexcept specifier and the noexcept operator in this post. 

My original plan was it to write in this post about the next rules to error handling. But I changed my plan to write about the future: contracts in C++20.

Error handling is an essential part of writing good software; therefore, the C++ core guidelines have about 20 rules for error handling.