This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.

Question

Over the years, I've seen C++ applications the employ the "unusual way" language in a crash. For example:

This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way. Please contact the application's support team for more information.

The first of these I debugged, it had something to do with a destructor being fired for a class, in an inheritance chain, that already had been deleted. I can't remember the particulars better than that. When I google this topic, I find one or two other suggested causes. For example, that the binaries themselves have become corrupt and must be re-written.

Overall, I find the information on this kind of crash to be much too thin. I'd like to see two things:

1. A formal explanation of why this type of termination exists (and which Windows platforms, if relevant).
2. A list of all reasons, or at least the common reasons, why this type of crash occurs.

Anyone know where this information can be found? Can anyone provide this information?

Answer 1

This dialog is produced by the visual studio runtime, in response to abort(). abort() is by default called by e.g. terminate(). You'll get this from e.g. unhandled c++ exceptions, call to pure virtuals, failed assertions.

So, it's not platform dependent, but run-time library dependent. abort() is, by the c++ standard, required to terminate the program without executing destructors for automatic and static storage objects, and without calling atexit() handlers.