On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 3:17 PM, Zachary Turner <divisortheory@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 5:08 PM, Emil Dotchevski <emildotchevski@gmail.com>wrote:
Adding stack trace support to Boost Exception was also discussed at BoostCon, it would definitely be a nice addition to the rest of the information recorded in Boost exceptions automatically by BOOST_THROW_EXCEPTION.
I'm guessing that the stack trace information could be stored in boost::exception as a little more than just a list of pointers to functions, and converted to string at the catch site. Of course this support should be kept separate from Boost Exception, IMO a simple interface like this would be ideal:
namespace boost { namespace debug { class stack_trace; shared_ptr<stack_trace> get_stack_trace(); std::string to_string( stack_trace const & ); } }
I do agree that at a bare minimum it should provide a to_string() function, but actually so much more than this is possible. The rudimentary support for this that I've implemented so far already can determine how many parameters a function has, its return type, the names of the arguments, the types of the arguments, the values of each parameter. So it would definitely be nice to provide iterators for these types of things, and accessors / enumerations to determine what data type something is, names of symbols, etc. This way (among other things, such as the file / line number / overloaded new and delete issue I mentioned in the previous post) someone could provide a custom formatter for a stack trace if they didn't like the default.
I can't think of a use case for wanting anything but a string, to be dumped into a bug report of some sort. You might need more than that if you want this interface to be powerful enough to implement a full featured debugger or whatever, but that's a different problem domain altogether. So I'd keep the stack trace interface simple and to the point. Emil Dotchevski Reverge Studios, Inc. http://www.revergestudios.com/reblog/index.php?n=ReCode