[Exceptional C++ Style] Item 12: Exception Safety: Is it Wort hit?

[James Dennett]

On Friday, December 3, 2004, at 01:31 AM, Ric Parkin wrote:

>
>
> From: "Paul Grenyer" <paul at paulgrenyer.co.uk>
>> This is a matter of opinion. I personally like to clean up properly, 
>> even
>> when an application has failed. Kevlin and I had a disagreement a few 
>> weeks
>> back (on accu-general I think??) about whether failed unit tests 
>> should
>> clear up properly. I think they should...
>
> That reminds me of a really tricky problem with unit testing under 
> C++....
>
> ...crashes.
>
> How do people's test harness cope with the code you're testing having 
> a bug that provokes an access violation/core dump?
>

I think the way is obvious, no?

> I think boost.test does something rather clever too - runs the test 
> under a seperate thread (process?) so if that test 
> crashes/deadlocks/goes into an infinite loop then it can kill it and 
> carry on.
>
That's normal; have a monitor process which reports if the process 
excecuting the test dies.
And make sure the monitor is as near as possible to bug-free (i.e., 
keep it simple, stupid).

-- James