C++ display stack trace on exception

Question

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.

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.

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();

I would like to add a standard library option (i.e. cross-platform) how to generate exception backtraces, which has become available with C++11:

Use std::nested_exception and std::throw_with_nested

This won't give you a stack unwind, but in my opinion the next best thing. It is described on StackOverflow here and here, how you can get a backtrace on your exceptions inside your code without need for a debugger or cumbersome logging, by simply writing a proper exception handler which will rethrow nested exceptions.

Since you can do this with any derived exception class, you can add a lot of information to such a backtrace! You may also take a look at my MWE on GitHub, where a backtrace would look something like this:

Library API: Exception caught in function 'api_function'
Backtrace:
~/Git/mwe-cpp-exception/src/detail/Library.cpp:17 : library_function failed
~/Git/mwe-cpp-exception/src/detail/Library.cpp:13 : could not open file "nonexistent.txt"

Unix: backtrace

Mac: backtrace

Windows: CaptureBackTrace

If you are using C++ and don't want/can't use Boost, you can print backtrace with demangled names using the following code [link to the original site].

Note, this solution is specific to Linux. It uses GNU's libc functions backtrace()/backtrace_symbols() (from execinfo.h) to get the backtraces and then uses __cxa_demangle() (from cxxabi.h) for demangling the backtrace symbol names.

// stacktrace.h (c) 2008, Timo Bingmann from http://idlebox.net/
// published under the WTFPL v2.0

#ifndef _STACKTRACE_H_
#define _STACKTRACE_H_

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <execinfo.h>
#include <cxxabi.h>

/** Print a demangled stack backtrace of the caller function to FILE* out. */
static inline void print_stacktrace(FILE *out = stderr, unsigned int max_frames = 63)
{
    fprintf(out, "stack trace:\n");

    // storage array for stack trace address data
    void* addrlist[max_frames+1];

    // retrieve current stack addresses
    int addrlen = backtrace(addrlist, sizeof(addrlist) / sizeof(void*));

    if (addrlen == 0) {
    fprintf(out, "  <empty, possibly corrupt>\n");
    return;
    }

    // resolve addresses into strings containing "filename(function+address)",
    // this array must be free()-ed
    char** symbollist = backtrace_symbols(addrlist, addrlen);

    // allocate string which will be filled with the demangled function name
    size_t funcnamesize = 256;
    char* funcname = (char*)malloc(funcnamesize);

    // iterate over the returned symbol lines. skip the first, it is the
    // address of this function.
    for (int i = 1; i < addrlen; i++)
    {
    char *begin_name = 0, *begin_offset = 0, *end_offset = 0;

    // find parentheses and +address offset surrounding the mangled name:
    // ./module(function+0x15c) [0x8048a6d]
    for (char *p = symbollist[i]; *p; ++p)
    {
        if (*p == '(')
        begin_name = p;
        else if (*p == '+')
        begin_offset = p;
        else if (*p == ')' && begin_offset) {
        end_offset = p;
        break;
        }
    }

    if (begin_name && begin_offset && end_offset
        && begin_name < begin_offset)
    {
        *begin_name++ = '\0';
        *begin_offset++ = '\0';
        *end_offset = '\0';

        // mangled name is now in [begin_name, begin_offset) and caller
        // offset in [begin_offset, end_offset). now apply
        // __cxa_demangle():

        int status;
        char* ret = abi::__cxa_demangle(begin_name,
                        funcname, &funcnamesize, &status);
        if (status == 0) {
        funcname = ret; // use possibly realloc()-ed string
        fprintf(out, "  %s : %s+%s\n",
            symbollist[i], funcname, begin_offset);
        }
        else {
        // demangling failed. Output function name as a C function with
        // no arguments.
        fprintf(out, "  %s : %s()+%s\n",
            symbollist[i], begin_name, begin_offset);
        }
    }
    else
    {
        // couldn't parse the line? print the whole line.
        fprintf(out, "  %s\n", symbollist[i]);
    }
    }

    free(funcname);
    free(symbollist);
}

#endif // _STACKTRACE_H_

HTH!