Question

I wrote a Linux program based on a buggy open source library. This library sometimes triggers segfaults that I cannot control. And of course once the library has segfaults, the entire program dies. However, I have to make sure my program keeps running even if the library has segfaults. This is because my program sort of serves as a “server” and it needs to at least tell the clients something bad happened and recover from the errors, rather than chicken out… Is there any way to do that?

I understand in Java one just needs to catch an exception. But how does C++ handle this?

[UPDATE]I understand there is also exception handling in C++, but Segfault is not an exception, is it? I don’t think anything is thrown when segfault happens. You have to explicitly “throw” something to use try…. catch…. as far as I know.

Thanks so much, I am quite new to C++.

Answer 1

You cannot reliably resume execution after a segmentation violation. If your program must remain running, fence off the offending library in a separate process and communicate with it over a pipe. When it takes a segmentation violation, your program will notice the closed pipe.