Question

Possible Duplicate:
How to prevent crash in C++

typedef struct {
    int val;
} valStruct;

main()
{
    try {
        valStruct *s = NULL;
        int v = s->val;       // bad 
    }
    catch (...) {}
}

Fairly new to MacOS. Running under the debugger I get a EXC_BAD_ACCESS break. Not too hard to guess that it means a bad memory access occurred, but I do not get a C++ exception and in the code above my catch will not be invoked.

This seems to be a bad thing, pretty much rendering C++ exception handling useless. Unless this is just a debug thing. If I run in release mode, or change settings, will this be handled as an exception?

Answer 1

Shortly: no. A segmentation fault (and some of the other common programming mistakes) are not “high-level” enough to be caught by C++ exception handlers, so the program will just crash. The solution: don’t rely on C++ exceptions magically saving you from thinking and writing good code. They’re not for that. You should really check for pointers being non-NULL before dereferencing them and things like that.