Is a finally block without a catch block a java anti-pattern?

Question

I just had a pretty painful troubleshooting experience in troubleshooting some code that looked like this:

try {
   doSomeStuff()
   doMore()
} finally {
            


        

Answer 1

In general, no, this is not an anti-pattern. The point of finally blocks is to make sure stuff gets cleaned up whether an exception is thrown or not. The whole point of exception handling is that, if you can't deal with it, you let it bubble up to someone who can, through the relatively clean out-of-band signaling exception handling provides. If you need to make sure stuff gets cleaned up if an exception is thrown, but can't properly handle the exception in the current scope, then this is exactly the correct thing to do. You just might want to be a little more careful about making sure your finally block doesn't throw.