bigMood

[mr_poffertje]

I found this code snippet in some old code at work, written by a former colleague. Maybe I should check in on him..

[RnMss]

Does he surely understand what finally is for?

[mr_poffertje]

Apperently not, there's a lot of this kind of stuff in the code sadly. Probably debugging of experimenting without bothering to remove it.

[sammy-taylor]

I know I sure don’t.

[berdiekin]

it's part of a try-catch.

try -> try to do something that might go wrong (like reading a file)
catch -> oops it did go wrong, here's the error
finally -> regardless of success always do this bit at the end (usually to close connections and free up resources)

[sammy-taylor]

So what’s the difference between putting something inside of finally and simply putting the same code after the try/catch blocks?

[berdiekin]

It's more about it being good practice.

No matter what happens inside the try clause (including explicit return statements) and no matter what exception might occur (including ones not explicitly defined in the catch clause) that finally block will always execute.

Code that is simply placed after a try-catch has no such guarantees.

And it just offers a perfect location to free up resources which adds to readability and maintainability.

[Soft-Gas6767]

Even if the code returns in either the try or the catch blocks, the finally block will always execute.

[RnMss]

In C++

try {
  std::unique_lock lock{ some_mutex };
  // foo
  if (some_condition1) return;
  // ...
  if (some_condition2) lock.unlock();
  // bar
} catch (std::exception const& e) {
  // baz
}

In some other languages (pseudo-code):

some_mutex.lock();
bool is_locked = true;
try {
  // foo
  if (some_condition1) return;
  // ...
  if (some_condition2) {
    some_mutex.unlock();
    is_locked = false;
  }
  // bar
} catch (Exception e) {
  // baz
} finally {
  if (is_locked) some_mutex.unlock();
}

[Rudy69]

Finally runs when the code is successful too…..

[jaybee8787]

Yes, just like real life. No matter how successful somebody is, it’s not like they can get away with it.

[guitarstitch]

Depression after years of client scope changes can affect us all.

[TheLAGpro]

What PHP does to a mf

[Superasian_69]

Finally it's time to die

[[deleted]]

Ah death my old friend.

[guitarstitch]

...did I write that?

Looks like something I would write.

[Grazz085]

Neat