Question

For example, I’m writing a multi-threaded time-critical application that processes and streams audio in real-time. Interruptions in the audio are totally unacceptable. Does this mean I cannot use the STL because of the potential slow down when an exception is thrown?

Answer 1

It’s not clearly written in the previous answers, so:

Exceptions happen in C++

Using the STL or not won’t remove the RAII code that will free the objects’s resources you allocated.

For example:

void doSomething()
{
    MyString str ;
    doSomethingElse() ;
}

In the code above, the compiler will generate the code to free the MyString resources (i.e. will call the MyString destructor), no matter what happens in the meantime including if if an exception is thrown by doSomethingElse or if you do a "return" before the end of the function scope.

If you have a problem with that, then either you should revise your mindset, or try C.

Exceptions are supposed to be exceptional

Usually, when an exception occurs (and only when), you’ll have a performance hit.

But then, the exception should only sent when:

• You have an exceptional event to handle (i.e. some kind of error)
• In very exceptional cases (i.e. a "massive return" from multiple function call in the stack, like when doing a complicated search, or unwinding the stack prior a thread graceful interruption)

The keyword here is "exceptional", which is good because we are discussing "exception" (see the pattern?).

In your case, if you have an exception thrown, chances are good something so bad happened your program would have crashed anyway without exception.

In this case, your problem is not dealing with the performance hit. It is to deal with a graceful handling of the error, or, at worse, graceful termination of your program (including a "Sorry" messagebox, saving unsaved data into a temporary file for later recovery, etc.).

This means (unless in very exceptional cases), don’t use exceptions as "return data". Throw exceptions when something very bad happens. Catch an exception only if you know what to do with that. Avoid try/catching (unless you know how to handle the exception).

What about the STL ?

Now that we know that:

• You still want to use C++
• Your aim is not to throw thousand exceptions each and every seconds just for the fun of it

We should discuss STL:

STL will (if possible) usually verify if you’re doing something wrong with it. And if you do, it will throw an exception. Still, in C++, you usually won’t pay for something you won’t use.

An example of that is the access to a vector data.

If you know you won’t go out of bounds, then you should use the operator [].

If you know you won’t verify the bounds, then you should use the method at().

Example A:

typedef std::vector<std::string> Vector ;

void outputAllData(const Vector & aString)
{
   for(Vector::size_type i = 0, iMax = aString.size() ; i != iMax ; ++i)
    {
       std::cout << i << " : " << aString[i] << std::endl ;
    }
}

Example B:

typedef std::vector<std::string> Vector ;

void outputSomeData(const Vector & aString, Vector::size_type iIndex)
{
   std::cout << iIndex << " : " << aString.at(iIndex) << std::endl ;
}

The example A "trust" the programmer, and no time will be lost in verification (and thus, less chance of an exception thrown at that time if there is an error anyway… Which usually means the error/exception/crash will usually happen after, which won’t help debugging and will let more data be corrupted).

The example B asks the vector to verify the index is correct, and throw an exception if not.

The choice is yours.