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A colleague of mine is working on a C++ Qt application which can encounter failures in many different ways. It is not feasible to restart the application, the user must get a proper error message instead. He didn't use exceptions because Qt doesn't use them (it returns "empty" objects instead) and.. well, error-handling without exceptions is brittle.

In hindsight, he should have coded the logic/business part in "modern" C++ with exceptions and implemented thin adapters to the GUI part. That's what I did in another piece of code, and am extremely happy with the outcome.

It's not even hard to get them right, "the lightbulb" lit up for me after reading the chapter on exceptions in Stroustrup's TC++PL.



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