Re: To check or not to check for NULL?

From:

Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.spamfilter@virtualinfinity.net>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:46:56 -0700

Message-ID:

<48dd65fc$0$3356$7836cce5@newsrazor.net>

Joshua Cranmer wrote:

Hendrik Maryns wrote:

There are some cases where it makes sense to catch an OOME, for example
in testing code in which you want to try out how big an input some code
can handle, where you have a loop repeating with ever bigger inputs and
if it throws an OOME, you break out of the loop and report the test
results, or start the next test etc. In production code, however, I
indeed see little use for it. You could think of an optional
memory-intensive computation which you try and if it doesn???t succeed,
you use some kind of back-up system.

The problem with trying to catch OOME is that it can be thrown
*anywhere.* Your computation may be the memory hog, but the error might
be thrown when the GUI updates itself and therefore completely the wrong
thread.

Although, if it is your alloc that fails specifically, that gives you
some ability to handle it. The goal is to handle the case where you
allocate "way too much", rather than "almost too much". ImageIO code
does this I believe.

--
Daniel Pitts' Tech Blog: <http://virtualinfinity.net/wordpress/>