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Guillermo Calvo edited this page Feb 27, 2019 · 4 revisions

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Why exceptions4c?

As you can see, there are other exception handling systems for C. Nevertheless, there are many reasons for choosing exceptions4c; here you have just 1000 one of them:

  • 000: Free Software
  • 001: Simple API
  • 010: ANSI C
  • 011: Safe
  • 100: Portable
  • 101: No Compilation Warnings
  • 110: Statically Checked
  • 111: Beautifully Crafted

You may also be interested in the 1000 features of the library.

Free Software

exceptions4c is released under the GNU LGPL in the hope that it will encourage free software development. In case you haven't heard about free software yet, you should know it is a matter of freedom, not price.

As with any free software, you are entitled to use this library for any purpose. You can also study how it works, and change it to make it do what you wish. You have the freedom to redistribute it, improve it, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

Simple API

The API is designed to be easy to use and intuitive. Its semantics are analogous to those of other exception handling systems. exceptions4c will feel natural to any programmer who has experience with languages that support exceptions natively.

exceptions4c will not stand in your way; most library functionalities are accessed through keywords introducing a block of code. For example, you write: try{ /* this */ } or: finally{ /* that */ } so your program does not get cluttered with error handling code.

ANSI C

The library is written in plain ANSI C and conforms to the ISO/IEC 9899:1990 standard (commonly referred to as C89 or C90). It does not rely on any non-ANSI extensions. Programs you write using exceptions4c can be ANSI compliant.

In order to avoid namespace conflicts, exported functions and variables have the prefix e4c_, and exported macros have the prefix E4C_. The only exported entities that do not follow this rule are: keywords (such as try or catch) and predefined exceptions (such as NullPointerException or NotEnoughMemoryException).

Safe

While exceptions4c adheres to the C89 standard, the author is well aware that there are quite a few unsafe functions in it. Moreover, these functions have their safe counterpart in the C99 standard. For example, snprintf is a buffer-safe version of sprintf, etc.

In order to achieve safety while mantaining backwards compatibility, exceptions4c provides two implementations. One of them uses the unsafe functions from the C89 standard. The other one uses the safe functions from the C99 standard, via conditional compilation. This allows the library to take advantage of newer compilers on those platforms which support them.

Portable

exceptions4c has no library dependencies. It uses nothing but standard C functions, and should compile using any ANSI compliant compiler. The library includes standard headers only: stdlib.h, stdio.h, stdarg.h, setjmp.h, signal.h and errno.h. If you want to use exceptions4c, you just need to drop e4c.h and e4c.c into your project and #include "e4c.h" from your sorce code. That's all.

The library can be customized via conditional compilation to fit your needs. For example, if you don't want the keywords try, catch etc. to be defined, you could set E4C_NOKEYWORDS on. There are also other compile-time parameters, such as: NDEBUG, E4C_THREADSAFE, E4C_FUNCTION_NAME, E4C_INVALID_SIGNAL_NUMBER and E4C_NORETURN.

No Compilation Warnings

Nobody likes compiler warnings. However, while some people seem to be happy just by ignoring them, disciplined programmers prefer to get rid of them properly. If you are one of them, you'll love to know that exceptions4c can be compiled with all warnings enabled, at the compiler's most pedantic setting.

For example, if you are using gcc you can set these flags on: -Wall -Wextra -pedantic. The library (and the testing framework) will compile with these setting without warnings.

Statically Checked

In addition to compiling without warnings, exceptions4c is also checked with Splint (a static source code analyzer) and passes with zero warnings.

All source code is annotated with stylized comments that document assumptions about functions, variables, parameters and types. This means that the semantics of the library are completely defined in terms of Splint annotations.

Beautifully Crafted

To me, exceptions4c is a really fun project to develop. This library is for coders who enjoy programming in C and want to improve the way they detect and handle errors in their applications.

The library also takes into account real-world platforms on which it will be compiled and run. For example:

  • If your compiler is C99 compliant, then the library will support the newer features: variadic macros, buffer safe functions, the standard bool type, etc.
  • If your platform is POSIX compliant, then the library will use the functions sigsetjmp and siglongjmp (instead of setjmp and longjmp).
  • If the library detects that you are using pthreads, it will ask you to enable its thread-safe version.

There are also other goodies, such as a packaged extension (DevPak) and a compiled HTML (CHM) version of the documentation.

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