Are there any open source projects that implement the same functionality with and without exceptions?

Question

I'm working on my thesis about the impact of using exceptions on code complexity. It would be really great if I had a few thousand LOC that use good old error handling and exceptions for the same functionality. I don't even know where to start googling. Any C#, Java, C++, D project would suffice. My best guess is a project that switched to exceptions at a given version. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Considering that in both Java and C# exception handling is essential for pretty much the complete base libraries, I doubt it.

Java is pretty much completely out of the loop because without out parameters you have to resort to extremely strange constructs (eg you either always return Object arrays or implement classes with a return value + the value that should be returned,..).

In c# you could theoretically get around using exceptions and using error codes if you ignore the base library, but I still doubt anyone would want to program that way. For both languages it's just integrated way too much into the core concept.

So your best bet of the named languages would be C++, but then C++ exceptions have a whole lot of problems compared to more modern implementations - really no fun to use them. You may look around for eg Python programs, I could imagine someone programming python without exceptions.

Anyways it's extremely unlikely (independent of language; although C++ is probably the only one where I could imagine it at all) to find a project that changed from error codes to exception handling - after all that'd be pretty much a complete rewrite..

Answer 2

I don't think you will find such projects, even if some project switched at some time, they will still be very much different, so you would compare apples and oranges anyway. Thesis is not supposed to be based on anecdotal information, questionable testing, and unwarranted conclusions.

You can approach this topic from two angles. One is to discuss theoretical implications of two approaches of error handling and illustrate that with three-liners. Another, is to conduct a controlled experiment writing probably short (~1000 lines) some real-life scenario test case and analyse it, followed by discussion whether it would or wouldn't scale on larger systems. And of course, if you have time (at least couple years) and money (at least couple million $) to hire a group of experienced developers and provide them with large-scale problems, you can gather some valuable statistics.

Answer 3

Not sure it fits, but:

GTK+ , the C library, uses error codes whereas gtkmm , its C++ wrapper, wraps them in exceptions. (Example: GTK+ g_thread_create() vs gtkmm Glib::Thread::create() ) Both are object-oriented.