Question

Is it ok to just call throw; from constructor if something goes awry, and you have no idea how to recover?

The idea is to let the app crash with a dump, as the state is unknown. Or should you always specify an argument?

From MSDN I only found that it rethrows if there is no argument, but no idea what happens if there is no initial exception to rethrow.

Answer 1

If there’s no exception currently being processed throw; will lead to terminate() being called immediately and that will end your program abnormally. That is not very convenient – you’ll have less information about what happened compared to throwing a meaningful exception. You could have thrown a meaningful exception, catch it at the top level (like main()), write some diagnostics and then end the program.