Best practices for catching Throwable in Java

Sometimes, you just have to catch Throwable, e.g. when writing a dispatcher queue that dispatches generic items and needs to recover from any errors (said dispatcher logs all caught exceptions, but silently, and then execution is continued on other items).

One best practice I can think of is to always rethrow the exception if it's InterruptedException, because this means someone interrupted my thread and wants to kill it.

Another suggestion (that came from a comment, not an answer) is to always rethrow ThreadDeath

Any other best practices?

java exception throwable

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If you're writing a dispatcher queue, then by the time the exception comes back to you there's no point in doing anything with it other than logging it. The Swing event queue has basically that type of behavior.

Alternatively, you could provide a hook for an "uncaught exception handler," similar to ThreadGroup. Be aware that the handler could take a long time, and end up delaying your dispatcher.

As far as InterruptedException goes: the only thing that cares about that is your dispatch loop, which should be checking some external state to see if it should stop processing.

answered 2009-07-08T11:51:10.387

Best practices for catching Throwable in Java

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