The draft named Robust design techniques for C Programs by David Turner introduce a modern languages like approach for exception handling in C. It speaks about four approaches for error handling in C.
1. Being extremely paranoid.
2. Implementing transactions which in concept similer to commit/rollback approach in databases.
3. Structured Exception Handling(SEH)
4. Cleanup stack exception handling(CSEH)
Of the four he recommends 4 th approach as the best. He expect that this paper will stir interest in this technique and motivate enough people to introduce such features in the libraries and programs they write..
I recently wrote an article for WSO2 Oxygentank called “Using WSF/C extended error handling mechanism in your own modules and applications.” which basically explain how WSF/C stack handle errors. From the above four approaches what WSF/C has taken is paranoid approach like many popular libraries programmed in C. However I belive that WSF/C could also greatly benefit from CSEH approach if carefully adopted. Infact James Clerk hinted about this approach in the early days of Axis2/C design discussions.
