Re: Exceptions in glib

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Andreas Bogk <andreas andreas org> writes:

> Hi!
> 
> I was discussing the problem of error handling in GTK with my
> colleagues, and ended up suggesting the use of an exception
> mechanism. 
> 
> Here's my first implementation of this, I would like to hear your
> opinions on whether that's a good thing to do in GTK or not:

The suggestion to add setjmp/longjmp exceptions has come up a lot.
The answer we've always arrived at is no.

 - It's not portable.
 - It's not safe if you have code in between that isn't expecting it
 - It's not safe with any language beside C.

Etc. The error handling mechanism we've introduced for GLib-2.0
is just a simple extra-parameter:

 GError *err = NULL;
 char *str;

 if (!g_file_get_contents (filename, &str, NULL, &err))
   {
     if (g_error_matches (err, G_FILE_ERROR, G_FILE_ERROR_NOENT))
       g_print ("File doesn't exist!\n");
     else
       g_print ("File could not be read: %s\n", err->message);

     g_clear_error (&err);
   }

Regards,
                                        Owen