Category: Programming

Throwing an exception in C++ requires more than unwinding the stack. As the program unwinds, local variable destructors must be executed. Catch clauses must be examined to see if they should catch the exception. Exception specifications must be checked to see if the exception should be redirected to the unexpected handler. Similar issues arise in…

If you followed my last post, you will see that in order to unwind the stack you have to find the FDE associated with a given program counter value. There are two steps to this problem. The first one is finding the CIEs and FDEs at all. The second one is, given the set of…

When gcc generates code that handles exceptions, it produces tables that describe how to unwind the stack. These tables are found in the .eh_frame section. The format of the .eh_frame section is very similar to the format of a DWARF .debug_frame section. Unfortunately, it is not precisely identical. I don’t know of any documentation which…

I committed the gccgo frontend to the mainline of gcc yesterday. Getting to this point was a long series of steps to get the various supporting patches approved. This means that gccgo will definitely be available in the gcc 4.6 release, which will happen sometime early next year. There is still quite a lot of…

One of the very nice features of Go is the package system. This permits compilation to be much faster than C++. In C++, if library A depends on library B depends on library C, that generally means that header files in A include header files in B and header files in B include header files…