Exceptions in C++

In Google C++ Style Guide they state that they are not using exceptions in C++ code at Google. They have reasons for it (“historical” mostly, as usual), but I do not necessarily agree with their view on it. Anyway, exceptions are quite a controversial topic in C++ community, and a must-read C++ Exceptions: Pros and Cons article at CodeProject goes deeper into the subject.

Personally I think that exceptions are really great, although I see how people can get things messy/wrong when using exceptions in inappropriate contexts and/or in inappropriate ways. Recipe to avoid problems? My own short list:

• Use exceptions when they are really needed, i.e. when something exceptional happened
• Understand Exception guarantees AKA Abrahams guarantees (see more at Exception-Safety in Generic Components – Lessons Learned from Specifying Exception-Safety for the C++ Standard Library by David Abrahams)
• Follow Resource Acquisition Is Initialization AKA Resource Initialization Is Acquisition (or RAII/RIIA in short) principle

Problem with C++/CLI + ATL Combo

Exactly… Wanted to use ATL (for CComPtr class and some other things) in my C++/CLI project (VS2008 with or without SP1) and… got nice assert on _CrtIsValidHeapPointer(pUserData) in dbgheap.c. Cool! Exactly that was missing to make my day better!

Some investigation, and I had answer to my problem. Actually two answers. Both pretty simple:

1. As I had /NOENTRY specified in the No Entry Point item in the Linker/Advanced section of the project settings, I could add __DllMainCRTStartup@12 to the Force Symbol References item in the Linker/Input section of the project settings
2. Alternatively, I could set No Entry Point item in the Linker/Advanced section of the project settings to No (as I said, I had /NOENTRY there)

I have tried both solutions, and both worked; I settled on the latter as more intuitive and clean. Always live, always learn…

marshal_as String Arrays

Giovanni Dicanio developed an extension (template specialization) to marshal_as<> library of Visual C++ 2008, to convert Unicode string arrays between managed (CLR) and native (STL/C++) code. The code is available at marshal_as String Arrays.

Arrays in C++/CLI

Nishant Sivakumar has pretty deep introduction of C++/CLI arrays (see also his blog for more interesting stuff about mainly C++/CLI).