Hello,
I am just starting to use Poco for a small project of my own. I am using it to start processes. I had a look at what happens when the Process::launch function fails to launch the process and I see that it throws Poco::SystemException. I see that there are a number of Poco exceptions, logic error, runtime error, assertion failure. Initially I thought this was very good. Then I noticed that they all inherit from Poco::Exception which inherits from std::exception. IMHO this is not so good. Here's why I think this:-
My gut reaction on learning that launch errors via an exception was to catch std::runtime_error. But this won't work because Poco::SystemError does not inherit from std::runtime_error. In fact no Poco exceptions inherit from this. The std exception hierarchy is not used. Even Poco::LogicException does not inherit from std::logic_error.
In the past I would not have cared about this very much, but now I have been working on a certain software project based on Windoze I have come to a different view. The project uses a home-grown maths library that can crash with arithmetic exceptions (divide by zero, overflow etc) and can crash with core dumps due to array subscript errors, references through null pointers etc. These errors are never going to be fixed. Instead, a microsoft feature known as Structured Exception Handling (SEH) is use. SEH turns these programmer errors into exceptions that inherit directly from std::exception. When one runs a function that handles any error by throwing an exception, it is useful to distinguish such errors from the ones that can come via SEH. So I tend to trap and handle std::runtime_error and let the SEH ones continue upward (where hopefully they will result in the termination of the program).
So it is very useful to be able to to distinguish between std::runtime_error and std::exception. But Poco does not let me do this, even though it has exception classes that make it look like there is such a distinction. Unfortunately the distinction is only within the Poco library and its exceptions; it is not carried through to the use the exception hierarchy in the standard.
Please, can someone explain why Poco exceptions do not follow the exception hierachy in the standard?
Regards,
Andrew Marlow
