[zeromq-dev] Improving zeromq in OOM conditions

[Martin Sustrik]

Hi Ilja,

> Could someone please explain why catching exceptions is dissalowed.
> Or "discouraged" has less strong meaning?

The problem is exceptions is that they make failure execution paths 
almost pretty blurry. When you throw an exception, it's basically 
impossible to find out who's (if at all) is going to catch it etc.

Exceptions are great for low reliability systems (GUIs and alike) but 
are not very good for systems that are supposed to be highly reliable. 
Error handling should be as explicit as possible in the latter case.

> Strong paradigms (like don't use delete, don't catch exceptions) are
> fine for students' works, not for real things.

The paradigm we use is well-established C paradigm ("return an error code").

On a different topic: The dependency on STL is pretty weak and can 
possibly be removed as part of the OOM work (fixed size containers 
instead of resizeable containers etc.) thus getting rid of exceptions 
entirely.

Martin