Question

This is a minor annoyance I have when debugging with Eclipse. With “Suspend execution on uncaught exceptions” checked, the debugger will normally suspend a thread right where the exception was thrown. Exceptions on the Event Dispatch Thread, however, cause it to pause on the last line of EventDispatchThread.run(). There is no useful information about what the exception is or what caused it until I resume the thread to allow the stack trace to print to the console.

Debug the following code in Eclipse to demonstrate:

public class SuspendOnUncaughtTest {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        javax.swing.SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
            public void run() {
                ((Object) null).toString();
            }
        });
    }
}

And here is what it looks like after the exception is thrown:

EDIT 10/21/2011: I guess there’s nothing weird going on with Eclipse or the Java debugger, it’s just that exceptions are caught and rethrown in EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForFilters(int). I suppose there’s no way to tell Eclipse to “suspend execution on exceptions that are going to be caught and possibly rethrown”. Too bad.

Answer 1

As far as I can tell, there is no solution to this. Eclipse is behaving correctly, the correct behavior is just annoying.