catch(…) is not catching an exception, my program is still crashing

Question

I\'m having a problem with a tester that my application crashes in initialization. I added more logging and exception handling but it still crashes with the generic \"this progr

Answer 1

If a C++ catch(...) block is not catching errors maybe it is because of a Windows error.

On Windows there is a concept called Structured Exception Handling which is where the OS raises "exceptions" when bad things happen such as dereferencing a pointer that is invalid, dividing by zero etc. I say "exceptions" because these are not C++ exceptions; rather these are critical errors that Windows defines in a C-style fashion - this is because Win32 was written in C so C++ exceptions were not viable.

See also:

• Difference between a C++ exception and Structured Exception
• try-except Statement
• Method of getting a stack trace from an EXCEPTION_POINTERS struct

Update based on comments

If you want both C++ exception handing and SEH perhaps you could try the following (untested) code:

__try
{
    try
    {
        // Your code here...
    }
    catch (std::exception& e)
    {
        // C++ exception handling
    }
}
__except(HandleStructuredException())
{
    // SEH handling 
}