Making Exception Handling Work

Most modern programming languages rely on exceptions for dealing with errors. Although exception handling was a significant improvement over other mechanisms like checking return codes, it’s far from perfect. In fact, it can be argued that this mechanism is seriously flawed. In this paper we argue that exception handling should be automatically done at the runtime/operating system level. The motivation is similar to the one that lead to garbage collection: memory management was a tedious and error prone process, thus virtual machines included support for taking care of it. We believe that many exceptions can be automatically dealt with, and recovered, as long as appropriate mechanisms exist in the runtime environment. We believe that this approach may dramatically influence the way programming languages are designed and significantly contribute to having more robust code, being actually developed with much less programming effort.