Re: [AD] 4.3 error handling

[Chris <chris.kcat@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 07 June 2006 18:48, Peter Wang wrote:
> That's just what you get for using a C library.

Which is, IMO, silly to be left without when something can be done about it. 
If something works in a language using standard language functions, and such 
a thing could prove useful, why not use it?

> > If it's optional, you don't have to use it. It wouldn't effect your code
> > at all.
>
> But I still need to think about it and it looks like a mess.

al_init(AL_NO_ERR_JUMPS);

That's it. That's even assuming it's on by default, and you don't need to pass 
a flag to turn it on.

> > (To note, I'm not saying this should move to C++. I'm just saying don't
> > be surprised when people start trying out clever "tricks" to get added
> > functionality. And when such "tricks" work, I don't really see a problem
> > with using them)
>
> If people want to pull tricks in their own applications, fine, but
> enshrining such tricks in an API is not a good idea.

I wouldn't really consider the basic concept a trick though. The very first 
line in the man page description for setjmp/longjmp is this:

"setjmp() and longjmp() are useful for dealing with errors and interrupts 
encountered in a low-level subroutine of a program"

This is exactly what it's being used for.

> Possibly a better error handling strategy to follow would be the cairo
> API, which seems to be quite well designed for both C and language
> bindings: http://www.cairographics.org/manual/bindings-errors.html
> I don't know how nice it is in practice.

It looks interesting, but I can see problems if an error occurs on something 
that's not an object. Or if the user is using the higher level API that has 
the objects abstracted away.