new operator

[Christian Christmann]

Hi,

a general question on the "new" operator.
Creating object dynamically using "new" might lead to problems,
when e.g. not sufficient memory is available and the object could
not be created on the heap. Shouldn't thus not all "new" usages
be included in a try{} block in order to enable handling of potential
problems?
However, their must be reasons why this is not done since lots of
people just use "new" without any corresponding exception
handling. Or is this just laziness?

Regards,
Chris

 

[=?ISO-8859-15?Q?Juli=E1n?= Albo]

Creating object dynamically using "new" might lead to problems,
when e.g. not sufficient memory is available and the object could
not be created on the heap. Shouldn't thus not all "new" usages
be included in a try{} block in order to enable handling of potential
problems?

No. For example, if the program is simple, let it to atutomatically call
terminate if there is not enough memory is perfectly acceptable (provided
the intended users are not dummies).

And in many cases you must not catch the exception if you can't do something
reasonable whit it, the caller may know what to do. The code must be
exception safe, that is, let all things in a reasonable state when an
exception is thrown.

 

[Andrzej 'Rudy' D.]

Christian Christmann narzeźbił(a):

Hi,

a general question on the "new" operator.
Creating object dynamically using "new" might lead to problems,
when e.g. not sufficient memory is available and the object could
not be created on the heap. Shouldn't thus not all "new" usages
be included in a try{} block in order to enable handling of potential
problems?

Take note of the standard std::set_new_handler function.

 

[Frederick Gotham]

Christian Christmann posted:

However, their must be reasons why this is not done since lots of
people just use "new" without any corresponding exception
handling. Or is this just laziness?

If I were allocating megabytes, then I'd error-check.

If I were allocating less than a kilobyte in a large GUI program, then I
wouldn't bother error-checking -- just let it crash and burn if it can't find
a miserable kilobyte to spare. (And by that time, the PC will have grinded to
a halt and will be doing some pretty noisy disk thrashing).

 

[Jim Langston]

Hi,

a general question on the "new" operator.
Creating object dynamically using "new" might lead to problems,
when e.g. not sufficient memory is available and the object could
not be created on the heap. Shouldn't thus not all "new" usages
be included in a try{} block in order to enable handling of potential
problems?
However, their must be reasons why this is not done since lots of
people just use "new" without any corresponding exception
handling. Or is this just laziness?

Regards,
Chris

Most of the time if I can't new enough memory for what I needed, there would
be nothing useful I could do other than display an error saying I was out of
memory and terminate. Which is what the default handler is going to do
anyway.

If, on the other hand, there is something I can do if I can't allocate
enough memory, maybe inform the user that there is not enough memory to load
what they are trying to load, try loading something else, then I would put
it in a try...catch() block.

 

[Michiel.Salters]

Hi,

a general question on the "new" operator.
Creating object dynamically using "new" might lead to problems,
when e.g. not sufficient memory is available and the object could
not be created on the heap. Shouldn't thus not all "new" usages
be included in a try{} block in order to enable handling of potential
problems?

For reliable programs, yes. Of course, a single try { } in main() does
include most of those cases. The only exceptions are calls to new in
constructors of globals, and those shouldn't use too much memory
anyway.

HTH,
Michiel Salters

 

[Ron Natalie]

Hi,

a general question on the "new" operator.

The question is, if new fails, what are you going to do
about it? In 99% of the time, you're not prepared to
handle new failures because unless you're very careful
anything that will handle it will also do something that
might allocate more memory.