Re: [Audacity-devel] Audacity Exception, error, and fault handling

[Matt B. <mbr...@cs...>]

Ryan Vaughan wrote:

> I'm not asking you guys to do the assignment for me, but a quick grep
> of the code found a decided lack of try, catch, or throws statements.
> I have noticed wxMessageBox is used to report some errors, I was
> wondering if you could point out any common error reporting techniques
> I could search for.

Audacity does not use C++ exception handling.  This is at least partly
because the APIs we use (and much of our own code) were originally
developed at a time when compiler support for exceptions was poor or
inconsistent.  In particular, there was a significant speed penalty for
code that used exception handling.  I'm not sure if this is still true
under more modern compilers.

Instead, we mostly use the C convention of returning error values from
functions.  I don't think we are particularly consistent about this; you
will have to look for examples to see the exact style(s) we use.

You should look at our use of the error-handling APIs in various
libraries, including wxWidgets, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC++, etc.  Some of these
are asynchronous APIs, which have somewhat different error-handling
styles.  (For example, see import/ImportFLAC.cpp in CVS HEAD.)