Failboxes: Provably Safe Exception Handling

The primary goal of exception mechanisms is to help ensure that when an operation fails, code that depends on the operation's successful completion is not executed (a property we call dependency safety). However, the exception mechanisms of current mainstream programming languages make it hard to achieve dependency safety, in particular when objects manipulated inside a try block outlive the try block. Many programming languages, mechanisms and paradigms have been proposed that address this issue. However, they all depart significantly from current practice. In this paper, we propose a language mechanism called failboxes. When applied correctly, failboxes have no significant impact on the structure, the semantics, or the performance of the program, other than to eliminate the executions that violate dependency safety. Specifically, programmers may create failboxes dynamically and execute blocks of code in them. Once any such block fails, all subsequent attempts to execute code in ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ECOOP
• Authors: Bart Jacobs 0002, Frank Piessens
• Keywords: Dependency Safety, ECOOP 2009, Exception Mechanisms, Fail Fast Mechanism, Programming Languages