[SDLmm-general] back in action

[Erich H. <er...@gm...>]

Hey everyone,

I'm in process of cranking out a crappy gaim plugin, but I am hoping
to start working on SDLmm really soon.  I know you are eager to see
any work at all, since it's been 4 years since the last commit :P 
This post is mainly to put things on the table for discussion.

Now David has said that he has specifically left exceptions out of the
library... I understand that a project goal is to stay as close to SDL
as possible, which means, of course, using return values for error
checking.  As much as I think this goal makes it easier on the
programmer used to writing in SDL, I think that this attitude
inherently means that some of the advantages of C++ are going to be
lost (exception handling would be one, however small).  I'm of the
opinion that, with some degree of restraint, perhaps this goal should
be stretched a bit to allow for further development / improvement and
not just a stagnant project.  David had already outlined his intention
of adding "additional features" to SDLmm, such as the sprite class,
but I wonder if this attitude can't be applied to the current source.

Anyway, here's my case for exception handling:

1) Exceptions offer a consistent way of handling errors.  We know that
if an error occurs within the library, an exception will be thrown. 
No need to check error values, check global error variables, pass
references or pointers to objects containing this type of information,
etc...

2) Exceptions reduce the amount of code the user of the library has to
write.  Instead of having something like:
if (SDL_CreateSurface(...) == -1) {
   /* error handling code */
}
and then having to rewrite the same construct again each time we call
a function, we need only put the body of main inside a try block, and
we can write code without having to _worry_ about error handling.

Motto: "less code? yayyy!"

3) Exceptions can hold additional information about the error, and not
just an error code or something retrieved from a global variable.  I
know this is an advantage, somehow... :)

There's a good discussion about exceptions on this page, if you're interested:
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=77463

Exceptions aside, before I actually DO anything, I want to read
through the code thoroughly, and alongside reading, fixing it up a bit
... is there any coding convention being used for the project right
now?

Anyway, I'd like very much to hear peoples' feedback about exception
handling.  Any additional concerns / requests / comments about the
library, or what could be done better would make my job a lot easier.

Thanks all,
Erich Herz