Question

I seem to remember at a previous job, when tracking down a certain bug I added a call to a function that made sure that floating point errors got reported in some way. I don’t remember exactly how – probably a callback, or maybe it caused a break in Visual Studio immediately when it happened.

Tried searching for this but got nothing. Does this ring a bell for anyone? This is for a Windows game, if that matters.

(I’m not talking about enabling first-chance exceptions in Visual Studio, I want to catch it “live” as well).

Answer 1

It’s called the floating-point environment. References:

• http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/numeric/fenv (C++11)
• http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009604599/basedefs/fenv.h.html (Unix)

To get exceptions to immediately halt your program, use platform-specific functions:

• http://www.gnu.org/s/hello/manual/libc/Control-Functions.html (glibc)
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e9b52ceh.aspx (Windows)
  • also: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/5z4bw5h5.aspx to get C++ exceptions; I think this is what you were after.