C++ Async Development (not only for) for C# Developers Part IV: Exception handling

Last time we were able to run some tasks asynchronously. Things worked great and it was pretty straightforward. However real life scenarios are not as simple as the ones I used in the previous post. For instance networking environment can be quite hostile – the server you are connecting to may go down for any reason, the connection might get dropped at any time, etc. Any of this condition will typically result in an exception which, if unhandled, will crash your process and bring down your application. C++ async is no different – you can easily check it for yourself by running this code:

pplx::task_from_result()
    .then([]()
    { 
        throw std::exception("test exception"); }
    ).get();

(the “for C# Developers” part – Note that in the .NET Framework 4 UnobservedTaskExceptions would terminate the application. It was later changed in .NET Framework 4.5 where UnobservedTaskExceptions no longer terminate applications (it is still recommended to observe and handle exceptions though). The behavior in C++ async with Casablanca is more in line with the .NET Framework 4 – any unobserved exception will eventually lead to a crash).
You might think that the way to handle this exception is just to wrap this call in a try…catch block. This would work if you blocked (e.g. used .get()) since you would be executing the code synchronously. However if you start a task, it will run on a different thread and the exception will be thrown on this new thread so, not where you are trying to catch it. As a result your app would still crash. The idea is that you have to observe exceptions not where tasks are started but where they are completed (i.e. where you call .get() or .wait()). Using a continuation for exception handling seems like a great choice because continuations run only after the previous task has completed. So, let’s build on the previous code snippet and add a continuation that handles the exception. It would look like this (I am still using .get() at the very end but it is only to prevent the main thread from exiting and terminating the other thread):

pplx::task_from_result()
    .then([]()
    { 
        throw std::exception("test exception"); }
    )
    .then([](pplx::task<void> previous_task)
    {
        try
        {
            previous_task.get();
        }
        catch (const std::exception& e)
        {
            std::cout << e.what() << std::endl;
        }
    }).get();

One very important thing to notice is that the continuation I added takes pplx::task<void> as the parameter. This is a so called “task based continuation” and is different from continuations we have seen so far which took the value returned by the previous task (or did not take any parameter if the previous task was void). The continuations we had worked with before were “value based continuations” (we will come back to value based continuations in the context of exception handling shortly). With task based continuations you don’t receive the result from the previous task but the task itself. Now you are in the business of retrieving the result yielded by this task. As we know from the previous post the way to get the result returned by a task is to call .get() or .wait(). Since exceptions are in a sense also results of executing a task if the task threw calling .get()/.wati() will result in rethrowing this exception. We can then catch it and handle and thus make the exception “observed” so the process will no longer crash. When I first came across this pattern it puzzled me a bit. I thought ‘.get() is blocking and I use async to avoid blocking so isn’t it a contradiction?’. But then I realized that we are already in a continuation so the task has already been completed and .get() is no longer blocking – it merely allows to get the result of the previous task (be it a value or an exception).
Coming back to value based continuations – let’s see what would happen if we added a value based continuation after the continuation that throws but before the continuation that handles this exception – just like this:

pplx::task_from_result()
    .then([]()
    { 
        throw std::exception("test exception"); }
    )
    .then([]()
    {
        std::cout << “calculating The Answer…” << std::endl;
        return 42;
    })
    .then([](pplx::task<int> previous_task)
    {
        try
        {
            std::cout << previous_task.get() << std::endl;
        }
        catch (const std::exception& e)
        {
            std::cout << e.what() << std::endl;
        }
    }).get();

(One thing to notice – since the continuation we inserted now returns int (or actually pplx::task<int> – there are some pretty clever C++ tricks used to allow returning just a value or (just throwing an exception) even though the .then() function ultimately returns a pplx::task<T> or pplx::task<void>) the task valued continuation now has to take a parameter of pplx::task<int> type instead of pplx::task<void> type). If you run the above code the result will be exactly as from the previous example. Why? When a task throws an exception all value based continuations are skipped until a task based continuation is encountered which will be invoked and will have a chance to handle the exception. This is a big and a very important difference between task based and value based continuations. This also makes a lot of sense – something bad happened and in value based continuations you have no way of knowing that it did or what it was since you have no access to the exception. There is also nothing to pass if the previous task would return something were there not for the exception. As a result executing value based continuations if nothing has happened would be plainly wrong.
If you have played a little bit with Casablanca or have seen some more advanced code that is using Casablanca you might have come across the pplx::task_from_exception() function. You might have been wondering why it is needed if you can just throw an exception. Typically tasks are executed on multiple threads and it is very common that an exception thrown in one thread is being observed on a different thread. As a result it is impossible to just unwind the stack when trying to find an exception handler. Rather, the exception has to be saved (which will make the task faulted) and then is re-thrown when the user calls .get() or .wait() to get the result. If you use the .then() function all this happens behind the scenes – you throw an exception from a continuation and the .then() function will catch it and turn into a faulted task which will be passed to the next available task based continuation. However consider the following function:

pplx::task<int> exception_test(bool should_throw)
{
    if (should_throw)
    {
        throw std::exception("bogus exception");
    }

    return pplx::task_from_result<int>(42);
}

If you pass true it will throw an exception, otherwise it will return a value. Note that I cannot just return 42; here because the return type of the function is pplx::task<int> and not int and there is no Casablanca magic involved which could turn my 42 into a task. Therefore I have to use pplx::task_from_result<int>() to return a completed task with the result. Now, let’s try to build a task based continuation that observes the exception we throw – something like this:

exception_test(true)
    .then([](pplx::task<int> previous_task)
    {
        try
        {
            previous_task.get();
        }
        catch (const std::exception& e)
        {
            std::cout << "exception: " << e.what() << std::endl;
        }
    }).get();

If you run this code it will crash. The reason is simple – we just synchronously throw from the exception_test function and no one is handling this exception. Note that we are not able to handle this exception in the continuation since it is never invoked – because there was no handler the exception crashed the application before it got to the .then(). To fix this the exception_test function needs to be modified as follows:

pplx::task<int> exception_test(bool should_throw)
{
    if (should_throw)
    {
        return pplx::task_from_exception<int>(std::exception("bogus exception"));
    }

    return pplx::task_from_result<int>(42);
}

Now instead of throwing an exception we return a faulted task. This task is then passed to our task based continuation which can now handle the exception.

That’s it for today. Next time we will look at cancellation.