Registration is now open for CppCon 2023! The conference starts on October 1 and will be held in person in Aurora, CO. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting some upcoming talks that you will be able to attend this year. Here’s another CppCon future talk we hope you will enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2023!

Exceptionally Bad: The Story on the Misuse of Exceptions and How to Do Better

Tuesday, October 3 • 09:00 - 10:00

by Peter Muldoon

Summary of the talk:

Exceptions were originally heralded as a new modern way to handle errors. However the C++ community is split as to whether exceptions are useful or should be banned outright. It has not helped the pro-exception lobby that in their enthusiasm to embrace exceptions, a lot of code has been written that puts exceptions in a bad light.

In this talk, We will present the original intent/history of exceptions and a brief overview of how exception mechanics work and how they circumvent the usual stack return mechanism to set the stage. we will then examine the philosophy of using exceptions and then the many cases of exception misuse including resource management, retries, hierarchies, data passing and control flow to name but a few.

For each case, we will then suggest better ways to handle each specific situation. In many cases, exceptions are often dropped in favor of some other more appropriate paradigm.

Finally, we will introduce situations that can truly benefit from exceptions and what a model exception class might look like.