C++ display stack trace on exception

Solution 1:

Andrew Grant's answer does not help getting a stack trace of the throwing function, at least not with GCC, because a throw statement does not save the current stack trace on its own, and the catch handler won't have access to the stack trace at that point any more.

The only way - using GCC - to solve this is to make sure to generate a stack trace at the point of the throw instruction, and save that with the exception object.

This method requires, of course, that every code that throws an exception uses that particular Exception class.

Update 11 July 2017: For some helpful code, take a look at cahit beyaz's answer, which points to http://stacktrace.sourceforge.net - I haven't used it yet but it looks promising.

Solution 2:

It depends which platform.

On GCC it's pretty trivial, see this post for more details.

On MSVC then you can use the StackWalker library that handles all of the underlying API calls needed for Windows.

You'll have to figure out the best way to integrate this functionality into your app, but the amount of code you need to write should be minimal.

Solution 3:

If you are using Boost 1.65 or higher, you can use boost::stacktrace:

#include <boost/stacktrace.hpp>

// ... somewhere inside the bar(int) function that is called recursively:
std::cout << boost::stacktrace::stacktrace();