Libunwind also works great in this context. For some cases I even found it to
work much better than backtrace. It also has a signal-safe functions that
facilitate implementation of stack printing on crash.
I work with projects where stack traces are added automatically to exceptions
during throw. It works quite well, and in fact I would disagree with author on
some of his points:
- stack trace not representative of source code, due to optimizations -
unwinding information is consistent with what you have in a source code, and
compiler optimization don't change that (i.e., it would be a compiler bug if
it did, see any design document about debugging information, for example in
LLVM / Clang).
- throw expression is not a place where the problem is - that is of course true
in general, but how much more useful is stack trace indicating code path
where exception have been thrown, than merely a type of exception. Name of
function which have thrown an exception is also a good start, but of limited
value for some common utility functions.
- memory allocation - dynamic memory allocation could be problematic, but
storing stack trace in exception object itself is quite simple and avoid this
problem altogether.
I work with projects where stack traces are added automatically to exceptions during throw. It works quite well, and in fact I would disagree with author on some of his points:
- stack trace not representative of source code, due to optimizations - unwinding information is consistent with what you have in a source code, and compiler optimization don't change that (i.e., it would be a compiler bug if it did, see any design document about debugging information, for example in LLVM / Clang).
- throw expression is not a place where the problem is - that is of course true in general, but how much more useful is stack trace indicating code path where exception have been thrown, than merely a type of exception. Name of function which have thrown an exception is also a good start, but of limited value for some common utility functions.
- memory allocation - dynamic memory allocation could be problematic, but storing stack trace in exception object itself is quite simple and avoid this problem altogether.