8.7 Exceptions

GNU Objective-C provides exception support built into the language, as in the following example:

  @try {
    …
       @throw expr;
    …
  }
  @catch (AnObjCClass *exc) {
    …
      @throw expr;
    …
      @throw;
    …
  }
  @catch (AnotherClass *exc) {
    …
  }
  @catch (id allOthers) {
    …
  }
  @finally {
    …
      @throw expr;
    …
  }

The @throw statement may appear anywhere in an Objective-C or Objective-C++ program; when used inside of a @catch block, the @throw may appear without an argument (as shown above), in which case the object caught by the @catch will be rethrown.

Note that only (pointers to) Objective-C objects may be thrown and caught using this scheme. When an object is thrown, it will be caught by the nearest @catch clause capable of handling objects of that type, analogously to how catch blocks work in C++ and Java. A @catch(id …) clause (as shown above) may also be provided to catch any and all Objective-C exceptions not caught by previous @catch clauses (if any).

The @finally clause, if present, will be executed upon exit from the immediately preceding @try … @catch section. This will happen regardless of whether any exceptions are thrown, caught or rethrown inside the @try … @catch section, analogously to the behavior of the finally clause in Java.

There are several caveats to using the new exception mechanism:

• The -fobjc-exceptions command line option must be used when compiling Objective-C files that use exceptions.
• With the GNU runtime, exceptions are always implemented as “native” exceptions and it is recommended that the -fexceptions and -shared-libgcc options are used when linking.
• With the NeXT runtime, although currently designed to be binary compatible with NS_HANDLER-style idioms provided by the NSException class, the new exceptions can only be used on Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) and later systems, due to additional functionality needed in the NeXT Objective-C runtime.
• As mentioned above, the new exceptions do not support handling types other than Objective-C objects. Furthermore, when used from Objective-C++, the Objective-C exception model does not interoperate with C++ exceptions at this time. This means you cannot @throw an exception from Objective-C and catch it in C++, or vice versa (i.e., throw … @catch).