Catching Stack Overflow Exceptions, part 2

In a previous post, I reported that stack overflow exceptions can only be caught by structured exception handlers. We had a little internal discussion following this which I found interesting, I thought you might too.

Naveed explained that on Windows, it is possible to catch hardware exceptions with C++ exception handlers because Microsoft implemented C++ exceptions with SEH.

There are two routes to catching hardware exceptions:

• Using catch(...)
• Registering a structured exception handler to C++ translator function

As a bonus, he wrote a sample which demonstrates both of these techniques. His translator function converts SEH exceptions to unsigned ints, although you could build a custom C++ object and throw that instead.

// SEHInCppTest.cpp : Defines the entry point for the console application.
#include "stdafx.h"
#include
#include

void SehToUnsignedIntCppExceptionTranslator(unsigned int e, _EXCEPTION_POINTERS* p)
{
throw (unsigned int)e;
}

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
try {
__asm cli
} catch( ... ) {
printf("Caught: Privileged instruction.\n" );
}

try {
int* pInt=0;
*pInt = 10;
} catch( ... ) {
printf("Caught: Access violation.\n" );
}

try {
int dividend=1;
int divisor=0;
int quotient = dividend / divisor;
} catch( ... ) {
printf("Caught: Integer division by zero.\n" );
}

// requires compiler flag /EHa to use our translator function
_set_se_translator( SehToUnsignedIntCppExceptionTranslator );

try {
__asm cli
} catch( unsigned int e ) {
printf("Caught: SEH Exception Code (via translation) 0x%X.\n", e );
}

try {
int* pInt=0;
*pInt = 10;
} catch( unsigned int e ) {
printf("Caught: SEH Exception Code (via translation) 0x%X.\n", e );
}

try {
int dividend=1;
int divisor=0;
int quotient = dividend / divisor;
} catch( unsigned int e ) {
printf("Caught: SEH Exception Code (via translation) 0x%X.\n", e );
}

return 0;
}