Exception Handling with the Arduino IDE

Question

I'm using a port of the STL found here and trying to debug with a simple try{...}catch{...} statement. When compiling with the Arduino IDE, I get the following error message:

exception handling disabled, use -fexceptions to enable.

I'm not quite sure what this means. Does the Arduino simply not support exceptions? Or is -fexceptions a compiler flag I can enable?

• KIIV: It's just disabled and if you want to use it, you have to provide -fexceptions flag to the compiler.

Answer 1

As you have already found out, add -fexceptions to the compiler flags. This can be done by modifying the platform.txt of your Arduino IDE installation.

See https://github.com/arduino/ArduinoCore-avr/blob/master/platform.txt#L28. There is -fno-exceptions defined, so you have to remove that, too.

• Snail Cadet: Perfect, this is the (complete) answer I was looking for.

Answer 2

Arduino is a very limited platform, and handling exceptions requires quite a bit of hidden code to properly unwind the stack wherever the exception occurs.

So the default is to turn it off and teach users to not use exceptions in arduino and instead other type of error handling.

• DataFiddler: The default is not to use STL neither.
• Snail Cadet: It's not just the default; Arduino has no built-in support for the STL.