Question

This is probably a very naive question.

I used to believe that a Throwable in Java always contains the stack trace. Is it correct?

Now it looks like that I catch exceptions without the stack trace. Does it make sense? Is it possible to catch an exception without the stack trace?

Answer 1

It’s possible to catch a Throwable object in Java without a stack trace:

Throwable(String message, Throwable cause, boolean enableSuppression,boolean writableStackTrace) 

Constructs a new throwable with the
specified detail message, cause, suppression enabled or disabled, and
writable stack trace enabled or disabled.

public Throwable fillInStackTrace()

Fills in the execution stack trace. This method records within this
Throwable object information about the current state of the stack
frames for the current thread.

If the stack trace of this Throwable is not writable, calling this
method has no effect.

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/Throwable.html