Beman Dawes <bdawes@acm.org> writes:
Do other Boosters like the idea of an overall guideline for dealing with operating system API error reporting?
Yep.
Guidelines
Unless otherwise specified, the default versions of all Boost library functions, except destructors, that call operating system API functions should check for API errors and report the occurrence of such errors by throwing an exception of type boost::system_error.
or a class derived therefrom.
Such functions should also have an overload that takes an additional argument of type boost::system_error_code& ec. The behavior of this overload is the same as the non-overloaded version, except that it does not throw an exception on an API error, and it sets ec to the error code reported by the operating system, or to 0 if no error is reported.
For functions where the non-overloaded version returns void, the overloaded version returns an object of type boost::system_error_code with the same value that ec was set to.
Does it worry you that this will potentially expose an implementation detail of the functions (i.e. that they use a system call) which may even differ from platform to platform, making code nonportable? If we do this, system_error_code should probably be a type that checks at runtime that its value has been inspected, and asserts otherwise. -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com