CppCon 2016: Patrice Roy “The Exception Situation'

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Exceptions have been a part of C++ for a long time now, and they are not going away. They allow programmers to concentrate on the meaningful parts of their code and treat the things that happen infrequently as… well, exceptional situations, to be dealt with when and where the context makes it reasonable or useful.

On the other hand, some significant parts of the C++ programming community either dislike this mechanism or outright reject it, for a number of reasons. Work in SG14 has raised performance issues in some cases; there are those who dislike the additional execution paths introduced in programs that rely on exceptions; some programmers raised issues with respect to exceptions and tooling, integration with older codebases, writing robust generic code, etc.

This talk will be neither for not against exceptions. It will present a perspective on cases where they make sense, cases where they are less appropriate, alternative disappointment handling techniques presented along with client code in order to show how the various approaches influence the way code is written. Performance measurements will be given along the way. Some creative uses of exceptions will also be presented in order to spark ideas and discussions in the room.
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Patrice Roy
Université de Sherbrooke
Professor
Sherbrooke (Québec), Canada
Patrice Roy has been playing with C++, either professionally, for pleasure or (most of the time) both for over 20 years. After a few years doing R&D and working on military flight simulators, he moved on to academics and has been teaching computer science since 1998. Since 2005, he’s been involved more specifically in helping graduate students and professionals from the fields of real-time systems and game programming develop the skills they need to face today’s challenges. The rapid evolution of C++ in recent years has made his job even more enjoyable. He’s been a participating member in the ISO C++ Standards Committee since late 2014 and has been involved with the ISO Programming Language Vulnerabilities since late 2015. He has five kids, and his wife ensures their house is home to a continuously changing number of cats, dogs and other animals.
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[richardcavell]

Handling disappointment, as Patrice puts it, is something that is a real problem for programmers to solve, every time they write code. This is a very good talk. Thanks, Patrice!

[ax-electron]

I remember the time when Patrice was pasting Disney Princess stickers as test scores on our exams sheets ^^ ! One of the best teacher i've ever had.

[troctschcpp]

Nice presentation Patrice! I was looking for such informations about exception handling in C++.
What I keep in mind : exception concept in C++ need more care to be more effective regarding current platforms we're working on.
Many thanks

[TaiDesHen]

Careful if you are watching at night with headset on! Occasional out of nowehere shouting! Great talk besides that.

[hymencallis]

As a suggestion, please refrain from using a serif font for the slides in future talks. Hardly anybody does that, and for a good reason. Not only does it look... unusual, it's also more difficult to read (due to anti-aliasing issues mainly). IMHO serif fonts should be reserved for printed matter or maybe *high* dpi displays, which most computer screens are not (still, probably).

Moreover, from another typographic perspective, the serif font looks completely different than the monospace font, which---at least for an OCD guy like me---is very distracting. For instance, using fonts from the same _font family_ (e.g. _Liberation_, _Fira_, or, maybe, _Droid_) your text will be much easier on the eyes.

Sorry for the completely off-topic rant.

[StormOwlRage]

I had to stop watching on account of the shouting. Just shouting would have been bearable, but the loud and guttural noise-making turns this into a very unpleasant lecture to follow on video.