How to work with unchecked exceptions?
c#, exception, java
Solution
When I first started using C# I was scared by this too. Then I found that actually, it doesn't matter very often. I very rarely find that I can catch an exception and so something useful with it anyway... almost all my exceptions bubble up to somewhere near the top of the stack anyway, where they're handled by aborting the request or whatever.
Now when I'm writing Java, I find checked exceptions intensely frustrating a lot of the time. I think there's value in there somewhere, but it introduces as many problems as it solves.
Basically, I think we haven't really got the whole error handling side of things "right" yet, but on balance I prefer the C# approach to the Java approach.
Problem
Java has compiler checked exceptions. When I made transition to C++, I learned it doesn't feature checked exceptions. At first, I kept using exception handling, because it's a great feature. However, after a while I abandoned it, because I got into a situation every function might throw an exception. As only a small percentage of the functions I write can throw exceptions (say some 25% at the most), I found the overhead of doing exception handling for functions that cannot throw anything unacceptable. Because of this, I am really surprised that there are a lot of developers who prefer unchecked exceptions. Therefore, I am curious to know how they handle this problem. How do you avoid the overhead of doing unnecessary exception handling in case the language doesn't support checked exceptions? Remark: My question equally applies to C++ and C#, and probably to all other languages that don't feature compiler checked exception handling.