Master’s Thesis Presentation • Software Engineering — A Study on the Effects of Exception Usage in Open-Source C++ SystemsExport this event to calendar

Friday, May 10, 2019 11:00 AM EDT

Kirsten Bradley, Master’s candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

Exception handling (EH) is a feature common to many modern programming languages, including C++, Java, and Python, that allows error handling in client code to be performed in a way that is both systematic and largely detached from the implementation of the main functionality. However, C++ developers sometimes choose not to use EH, as they feel that its use increases complexity of the resulting code; new control flow paths are added to the code, “stack unwinding” adds extra responsibilities for the developer to worry about, and EH arguably detracts from the modular design of the system.

In this thesis, we perform an exploratory empirical study the effects of exceptions in 2721 open source C++ systems taken from GitHub. We observed that the number of edges in an augmented call graph increases, on average, by 22% when edges for exception flow are added to a graph. Additionally, about 8 out of 9 functions that may throw an exception do not initiate that exception. These results suggest that, in practice, the use of C++ EH can add complexity to the design of the system that developers must strive to be aware of.

Location 
DC - William G. Davis Computer Research Centre
3102
200 University Avenue West

Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1
Canada

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