Why is exception handling bad?

Question

Google's Go language has no exceptions as a design choice, and Linus of Linux fame has called exceptions crap. Why?

Answer 1

Exceptions make it really easy to write code where an exception being thrown will break invariants and leave objects in an inconsistent state. They essentially force you to remember that most every statement you make can potentially throw, and handle that correctly. Doing so can be tricky and counter-intuitive.

Consider something like this as a simple example:

class Frobber
{
    int m_NumberOfFrobs;
    FrobManager m_FrobManager;

public:
    void Frob()
    {
        m_NumberOfFrobs++;

        m_FrobManager.HandleFrob(new FrobObject());
    }
};

Assuming the FrobManager will delete the FrobObject, this looks OK, right? Or maybe not... Imagine then if either FrobManager::HandleFrob() or operator new throws an exception. In this example, the increment of m_NumberOfFrobs does not get rolled back. Thus, anyone using this instance of Frobber is going to have a possibly corrupted object.

This example may seem stupid (ok, I had to stretch myself a bit to construct one :-)), but, the takeaway is that if a programmer isn't constantly thinking of exceptions, and making sure that every permutation of state gets rolled back whenever there are throws, you get into trouble this way.

As an example, you can think of it like you think of mutexes. Inside a critical section, you rely on several statements to make sure that data structures are not corrupted and that other threads can't see your intermediate values. If any one of those statements just randomly doesn't run, you end up in a world of pain. Now take away locks and concurrency, and think about each method like that. Think of each method as a transaction of permutations on object state, if you will. At the start of your method call, the object should be clean state, and at the end there should also be a clean state. In between, variable foo may be inconsistent with bar, but your code will eventually rectify that. What exceptions mean is that any one of your statements can interrupt you at any time. The onus is on you in each individual method to get it right and roll back when that happens, or order your operations so throws don't effect object state. If you get it wrong (and it's easy to make this kind of mistake), then the caller ends up seeing your intermediate values.

Methods like RAII, which C++ programmers love to mention as the ultimate solution to this problem, go a long way to protect against this. But they aren't a silver bullet. It will make sure you release resources on a throw, but doesn't free you from having to think about corruption of object state and callers seeing intermediate values. So, for a lot of people, it's easier to say, by fiat of coding style, no exceptions. If you restrict the kind of code you write, it's harder to introduce these bugs. If you don't, it's fairly easy to make a mistake.

Entire books have been written about exception safe coding in C++. Lots of experts have gotten it wrong. If it's really that complex and has so many nuances, maybe that's a good sign that you need to ignore that feature. :-)

Answer 2

The reason for Go not having exceptions is explained in the Go language design FAQ:

Exceptions are a similar story. A number of designs for exceptions have been proposed but each adds significant complexity to the language and run-time. By their very nature, exceptions span functions and perhaps even goroutines; they have wide-ranging implications. There is also concern about the effect they would have on the libraries. They are, by definition, exceptional yet experience with other languages that support them show they have profound effect on library and interface specification. It would be nice to find a design that allows them to be truly exceptional without encouraging common errors to turn into special control flow that requires every programmer to compensate.

Like generics, exceptions remain an open issue.

In other words, they haven't yet figured out how to support exceptions in Go in a way that they think is satisfactory. They are not saying that Exceptions are bad per se;

UPDATE - May 2012

The Go designers have now climbed down off the fence. Their FAQ now says this:

We believe that coupling exceptions to a control structure, as in the try-catch-finally idiom, results in convoluted code. It also tends to encourage programmers to label too many ordinary errors, such as failing to open a file, as exceptional.

Go takes a different approach. For plain error handling, Go's multi-value returns make it easy to report an error without overloading the return value. A canonical error type, coupled with Go's other features, makes error handling pleasant but quite different from that in other languages.

Go also has a couple of built-in functions to signal and recover from truly exceptional conditions. The recovery mechanism is executed only as part of a function's state being torn down after an error, which is sufficient to handle catastrophe but requires no extra control structures and, when used well, can result in clean error-handling code.

See the Defer, Panic, and Recover article for details.

So the short answer is that they can do it differently using multi-value return. (And they do have a form of exception handling anyway.)

---

... and Linus of Linux fame has called exceptions crap.

If you want to know why Linus thinks exceptions are crap, the best thing is to look for his writings on the topic. The only thing I've tracked down so far is this quote that is embedded in a couple of emails on C++:

"The whole C++ exception handling thing is fundamentally broken. It's especially broken for kernels."

You'll note that he's talking about C++ exceptions in particular, and not exceptions in general. (And C++ exceptions do apparently have some issues that make them tricky to use correctly.)

My conclusion is that Linus hasn't called exceptions (in general) "crap" at all!

Answer 3

Exceptions are not bad per se, but if you know they are going to happen a lot, they can be expensive in terms of performance.

The rule of thumb is that exceptions should flag exceptional conditions, and that you should not use them for control of program flow.

Answer 4

I disagree with "only throw exceptions in an exceptional situation." While generally true, it's misleading. Exceptions are for error conditions (execution failures).

Regardless of the language you use, pick up a copy of Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries (2nd Edition). The chapter on exception throwing is without peer. Some quotes from the first edition (the 2nd's at my work):

• DO NOT return error codes.
• Error codes can be easily ignored, and often are.
• Exceptions are the primary means of reporting errors in frameworks.
• A good rule of thumb is that if a method does not do what its name suggests, it should be considered a method-level failure, resulting in an exception.
• DO NOT use exceptions for the normal flow of control, if possible.

There are pages of notes on the benefits of exceptions (API consistency, choice of location of error handling code, improved robustness, etc.) There's a section on performance that includes several patterns (Tester-Doer, Try-Parse).

Exceptions and exception handling are not bad. Like any other feature, they can be misused.

Answer 5

From the perspective of golang, I guess not having exception handling keeps the compiling process simple and safe.

From the perspective of Linus, I understand that kernel code is ALL about corner cases. So it makes sense to refuse exceptions.

Exceptions make sense in code were it's okay to drop the current task on the floor, and where common case code has more importance than error handling. But they require code generation from the compiler.

For example, they are fine in most high-level, user-facing code, such as web and desktop application code.

Answer 6

Exceptions in and of themselves are not "bad", it's the way that exceptions are sometimes handled that tends to be bad. There are several guidelines that can be applied when handling exceptions to help alleviate some of these issues. Some of these include (but are surely not limited to):

1. Do not use exceptions to control program flow - i.e. do not rely on "catch" statements to change the flow of logic. Not only does this tend to hide various details around the logic, it can lead to poor performance.
2. Do not throw exceptions from within a function when a returned "status" would make more sense - only throw exceptions in an exceptional situation. Creating exceptions is an expensive, performance-intensive operation. For example, if you call a method to open a file and that file does not exist, throw a "FileNotFound" exception. If you call a method that determines whether a customer account exists, return a boolean value, do not return a "CustomerNotFound" exception.
3. When determining whether or not to handle an exception, do not use a "try...catch" clause unless you can do something useful with the exception. If you are not able to handle the exception, you should just let it bubble up the call stack. Otherwise, exceptions may get "swallowed" by the handler and the details will get lost (unless you rethrow the exception).

Answer 7

Typical arguments are that there's no way to tell what exceptions will come out of a particular piece of code (depending on language) and that they are too much like gotos, making it difficult to mentally trace execution.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2003/10/13.html

There is definitely no consensus on this issue. I would say that from the point of view of a hard-core C programmer like Linus, exceptions are definitely a bad idea. A typical Java programmer is in a vastly different situation, though.

Answer 8

Exceptions aren't bad. They fit in well with C++'s RAII model, which is the most elegant thing about C++. If you have a bunch of code already that's not exception safe, then they're bad in that context. If you're writing really low level software, like the linux OS, then they're bad. If you like littering your code with a bunch of error return checks, then they not helpful. If you don't have a plan for resource control when an exception is thrown (that C++ destructors provides) then they're bad.

Answer 9

A great use-case for exceptions is thus....

Say you are on a project and every controller (around 20 different major ones) extends a single superclass controller with an action method. Then every controller does a bunch of stuff different from each other calling objects B, C, D in one case and F, G, D in another case. Exceptions come to the rescue here in many cases where there was tons of return code and EVERY controller was handling it differently. I whacked all that code, threw the proper exception from "D", caught it in the superclass controller action method and now all our controllers are consistent. Previously D was returning null for MULTIPLE different error cases that we want to tell the end-user about but couldn't and I didn't want to turn the StreamResponse into a nasty ErrorOrStreamResponse object (mixing a data structure with errors in my opinion is a bad smell and I see lots of code return a "Stream" or other type of entity with error info embedded in it(it should really be the function returns the success structure OR the error structure which I can do with exceptions vs. return codes)....though the C# way of multiple responses is something I might consider sometimes though in many cases, the exception can skip a whole lot of layers(layers that I don't need to clean up resources on either).

yes, we have to worry about each level and any resource cleanup/leaks but in general none of our controllers had any resources to clean up after.

thank god we had exceptions or I would have been in for a huge refactor and wasted too much time on something that should be a simple programming problem.

Answer 10

Theoretically they are really bad. In perfect mathematical world you cannot get exception situations. Look at the functional languages, they have no side effects, so they virtually do not have source for unexceptional situations.

But, reality is another story. We always have situations that are "unexpected". This is why we need exceptions.

I think we can think of exceptions as of syntax sugar for ExceptionSituationObserver. You just get notifications of exceptions. Nothing more.

With Go, I think they will introduce something that will deal with "unexpected" situations. I can guess that they will try to make it sound less destructive as exceptions and more as application logic. But this is just my guess.

Answer 11

The exception-handling paradigm of C++, which forms a partial basis for that of Java, and in turn .net, introduces some good concepts, but also has some severe limitations. One of the key design intentions of exception handling is to allow methods to ensure that they will either satisfy their post-conditions or throw an exception, and also ensure that any cleanup which needs to happen before a method can exit, will happen. Unfortunately, the exception-handling paradigms of C++, Java, and .net all fail to provide any good means of handling the situation where unexpected factors prevent the expected cleanup from being performed. This in turn means that one must either risk having everything come to a screeching halt if something unexpected happens (the C++ approach to handling an exception occurs during stack unwinding), accept the possibility that a condition which cannot be resolved due to a problem that occurred during stack-unwinding cleanup will be mistaken for one which can be resolved (and could have been, had the cleanup succeeded), or accept the possibility that an unresolvable problem whose stack-unwinding cleanup triggers an exception that would typically be resolvable, might go unnoticed as code which handles the latter problem declares it "resolved".

Even if exception handling would generally be good, it's not unreasonable to regard as unacceptable an exception-handling paradigm that fails to provide a good means for handling problems that occur when cleaning up after other problems. That isn't to say that a framework couldn't be designed with an exception-handling paradigm that could ensure sensible behavior even in multiple-failure scenarios, but none of the top languages or frameworks can as yet do so.

Answer 12

I havent read all of the other answers, so this ma yhave already been mentioned, but one criticism is that they cause programs to break in long chains, making it difficult to track down errors when debugging the code. For example, if Foo() calls Bar() which calls Wah() which calls ToString() then accidentily pushing the wrong data into ToString() ends up looking like an error in Foo(), an almost completely unrelated function.

Answer 13

For me the issue is very simple. Many programmers use exception handler inappropriately. More language resource is better. Be capable to handle exceptions is good. One example of bad use is a value that must be integer not be verified, or another input that may divide and not be checked for division of zero... exception handling may be an easy way to avoid more work and hard thinking, the programmer may want to do a dirty shortcut and apply an exception handling... The statement: "a professional code NEVER fails" might be illusory, if some of the issues processed by the algorithm are uncertain by its own nature. Perhaps in the unknown situations by nature is good come into play the exception handler. Good programming practices are a matter of debate.

Answer 14

• Exception not being handled is generally bad.
• Exception handled badly is bad (of course).
• The 'goodness/badness' of exception handling depends on the context/scope and the appropriateness, and not for the sake of doing it.

Answer 15

Okay, boring answer here. I guess it depends on the language really. Where an exception can leave allocated resources behind, they should be avoided. In scripting languages they just desert or overjump parts of the application flow. That's dislikable in itself, yet escaping near-fatal errors with exceptions is an acceptable idea.

For error-signaling I generally prefer error signals. All depends on the API, use case and severity, or if logging suffices. Also I'm trying to redefine the behaviour and throw Phonebooks() instead. The idea being that "Exceptions" are often dead ends, but a "Phonebook" contains helpful information on error recovery or alternative execution routes. (Not found a good use case yet, but keep trying.)