Catch-all handler are problematic on Windows
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Key: XERCESC-1368
URL: http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/XERCESC-1368
Project: Xerces-C++
Type: Bug
Components: Miscellaneous
Versions: 2.6.0
Environment: Windows XP with Visual Studio .NET 2003
Reporter: David Bertoni
Exception handlers of the form "catch(...)" are causing problems in our product
code on Windows, because they are catching hardware exceptions, such as access
violations.
There is an article in the MSDN Knowledge Base that describes how this has
changed between Visual Studio 6, and Visual Studio .NET:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vclang/html/_core_exception_handling.3a_.default_synchronous_exception_model.asp
However, my experience with Xerces-C using Visual Studio .NET 2003 is that
hardware exceptions (asynchronous exceptions, in the Microsoft parlance) are
still being caught in Xerces-C in catch-all handlers. This is problematic
because it interferes with normal diagnosis of hardware faults, and can lead to
code being executed in Xerces-C when the system is in an unknown state. It is
also a makes it difficult to write code that will behave the same on other
platforms.
Looking into the code reveals multiple places where a catch-all handler resets
some object (or some other similar behavior), then rethrows the same exception.
I'd like to propose that we try to eliminate as many of these catch handlers
as possible by replaces these actions with stack objects that perform these
actions automatically whether or not an exception is thrown (auto_ptr-like
behavior). This will also have the benefit of simplifying the code. From a
"philosophical" perspective, I also think its better for code to catch the
exceptions it's concerned with, and avoid catch-all handlers except when
absolutely necessary.
I will attach a proposed patch for a class that does this sort of thing, and
some modified code that uses this class. I would also like to see if anyone
else has observed this behavior in their Windows applications.
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