CppCon 2015

Getting exception handling right is a perennial problem in C++ that has eluded systematization. Not for much longer. New language and library developments make it possible to handle exceptions in a declarative manner, leading to drastic code simplification.

This talk discusses an alternative approach to handling exceptional flow that eliminates the need for small ancillary RAII classes, try/catch statements that rethrow, and other cleanup mechanisms. The popular Scope Guard idiom gets a spectacular generalization. Statements specify in a declarative manner actions to be taken if the current scope is left normally or via an exception. The resulting code is simpler, smaller, and easier to maintain.