Question

I have a C++ application built in MS Visual Studio 2005 that links to a 3rd party library. For a certain input, the application crashes in the 3rd party library (apparently somewhere in realloc.c; so has to be a memory issue of some kind). I ran in release because the input is huge. So I ran until it crashes and then choose to debug. While I separately debug the guilty function, I was hoping to use some exception handling to prevent the application from crashing and instead exit cleanly. So I used something like:

try {
   //- call 3rd party application function that fails
}
catch(...) {
   //- handle exception or whatever
   Logger::Fatal("Fatal error: Exiting...");
   return false;
}

But to my surprise the application still crashes! I was expecting to see it display the error message since I’ve presumably caught all exceptions with the ellipsis (…); what am I missing here? I even tried setting /EHca (was /EHsc) in Project Properties -> C/C++ -> Code Configuration -> Enable Exception Handling. On a related note about what might be causing the problem, is the following usage correct?

my_class* mc[] = {nil, nil, nil};
for (int i = 0; i < 3; ++i) {
    mc[i] = new my_class();
    //-Do stuff with mc[i]
    if (mc[i] != nil) {
       delete mc[i];
       mc[i] = nil;
    }
}

The failure to get the exception handling working is rather puzzling. I would certainly appreciate ideas/insights from the C++ gurus out there. BTW, the same problem also occurs on Linux (RHEL5) but I am currently trying to get the exception handling to work on Windows.

NOTE: When I let it debug after the crash. I do get an “Access violation..unable to read location” message. With this updated info, I was hoping something in C++ would still work on both Windows & Linux for such crashes.

Answer 1

Have you tried catching the crash by calling SetUnhandledExceptionFilter?