Risking the exception anti-pattern.. with some modifications
- by Sridhar Iyer
Lets say that I have a library which runs 24x7 on certain machines. Even if the code is rock solid, a hardware fault can sooner or later trigger an exception. I would like to have some sort of failsafe in position for events like this. One approach would be to write wrapper functions that encapsulate each api a:
returnCode=DEFAULT;
try
{
returnCode=libraryAPI1();
}
catch(...)
{
returnCode=BAD;
}
return returnCode;
The caller of the library then restarts the whole thread, reinitializes the module if the returnCode is bad.
Things CAN go horribly wrong. E.g.
if the try block(or libraryAPI1()) had:
func1();
char *x=malloc(1000);
func2();
if func2() throws an exception, x will never be freed. On a similar vein, file corruption is a possible outcome.
Could you please tell me what other things can possibly go wrong in this scenario?
