Modern C++: Efficient and Scalable Application Development

Structured Exception Handling

Native exceptions in Windows are Structured Exceptions Handling (SEH) and Visual C++ has a language extension to allow you to catch these exceptions. It is important to understand that they are not the same as C++ exceptions, which are considered by the compiler to be synchronous, that is, the compiler knows if a method may (or specifically, will not) throw a C++ exception, and it uses this information when analysing code. C++ exceptions are also caught by type. SEH is not a C++ concept, so the compiler treats structured exceptions as being asynchronous, meaning it treats any code within an SEH protected block as potentially raising a structured exception, and hence the compiler cannot perform optimizations. ...