Re: Exception Safety

From:
Alex Shulgin <alex.shulgin@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Thu, 24 May 2007 13:20:46 CST
Message-ID:
<1180020072.519030.148730@k79g2000hse.googlegroups.com>
On May 24, 10:27 am, jawc...@gmail.com wrote:

{ Some lines are too long. Please fit your text into 70 columns or so;
  at most 79 columns. -mod }

I am sort of newbie to C++, reading thru books kind. Read quite a few
but stumbled on Herb Sutter's explanation of exception safety. He says
that the constructor of

template <typename T>
class Stack {
public:
       Stack();
      ~Stack();

private:
       T* _v;
      size_t _vsize;
      size_t _vused;

public:
Stack<T>::Stack() : _v(0), _vsize(10), _vused(0) {
      _v = new T[_vsize];

}

is exception safe because
    if new throws bad_alloc, no memory is allocated any way (I got this one)
    if T() throws,
          all the constructed T's are destroyed properly (did not get this) and
          delete[] is called *automatically* and frees up the memory (lost
here too)


This is guaranteed by the standard and compilers are required to
implement this. No magic here :-)

I just *did not* get these assertions. I wrote some test code where 5th
construct of T throws exception. Then neither the destructors for the first
4 T's
get called, nor the delete[], nor ~Stack() (if it were to call delete[]).

Can any one help me as to what I am thick on?
Would appreciate if cced too on jawc...@gmail.com


This is probably because you do not have a try/catch around your test
stack object construction and the program terminates due to uncaught
exception _before_ the code to destroy the object gets called.

Try this code (I've adjusted your class a little):

#include <cstddef>
#include <stdexcept>
#include <iostream>
#include <ostream>

template <typename T>
class Stack
{
    T* _v;
    size_t _vsize;
    size_t _vused;

public:
    Stack(size_t size) : _v(0), _vsize(size), _vused(0)
    {
        _v = new T[_vsize];
    }
};

class Test
{
public:
    Test()
    {
        static int count = 0;
        if (++count == 5)
        {
            throw std::runtime_error("test error");
        }
        std::cout << "Test()" << std::endl;
    }
    ~Test()
    {
        std::cout << "~Test()" << std::endl;
    }
};

int
main()
try
{
    Stack< Test > stack(10);
    return 0;
}
catch (std::exception const& error)
{
    std::cerr << "error: " << error.what() << std::endl;
    return 1;
}

The code gives me this output:

$ !g
g++ exception-safety.cpp
$ !.
../a
Test()
Test()
Test()
Test()
~Test()
~Test()
~Test()
~Test()
error: test error
$

As you can see, the four Test objects are destroyed properly.

Regards,
Alex Shulgin
PS: Please post a compilable code sample next time :-)

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