Are you exceptionally curious?

Exceptional exploration (2)

by Lucian Radu Teodorescu

From the article:

To use or not to use exceptions? That is the question. Asked again.

In the previous post we explored the performance implications of various error handling mechanisms. Here we continue our exploration of error handling mechanisms but focusing on modifiability – i.e., the ability of the code to be easy to write and be modified in the future.

We argue that exceptions are both a good thing and a bad thing. We attempt to divide the scenarios into multiple categories, and we provide reasons pro and con for each category. The goal is to find the contexts in which it’s better to use exceptions. The answer may be surprising: there are more cases in which manual error handling is better than using exceptions. If only standard library would support non-exception policies…