Can a C program handle C++ exceptions?

Question

I am developing C++ component dll that can be used by C or C++ applications. The exposed dll functions are as follows

#include 
#ifdef IMPORT
         


        

Answer 1

If this is Windows using MSVC then yes you can catch exceptions in C but you can't catch them that well. C++ exceptions are fed through the OS ABI's Structured Exception Handling mechanism, and Microsoft have a __try, __except, __finally C extension to handle OS structured exceptions. Note that these include access violations, divide-by-zero, etc. that you'd normally want to terminate your program and log a bug report. You can identify C++ exceptions by code 0xE04D5343 (4D 53 43 = "MSC") and throw the rest on.

That all said, you probably don't want to be throwing exceptions across a DLL boundary, and certainly not if you're only exposing a C API.