The Shenandoah Garbage Collector (GC) is a low-pause garbage collector designed for applications that require ultra-low latency. It is a concurrent GC that aims to reduce the impact of pause times on the application, allowing it to run smoothly and responsively. However, like any GC, there may be scenarios where exceptions occur or errors are encountered during the garbage collection process. In this blog post, we will explore how to handle exceptions and error handling with the Shenandoah GC.

1. Understanding Shenandoah GC’s Exception Handling Mechanism

The Shenandoah GC provides an exception handling mechanism to handle various exceptions that may occur during garbage collection. When an exception is encountered, Shenandoah attempts to return the program state to a consistent state and then throws the exception. This ensures that exceptions during garbage collection do not leave the application in an inconsistent state.

2. Catching Exceptions with Try-Catch Blocks

To handle exceptions that occur during garbage collection with Shenandoah, you can use try-catch blocks in your code. This allows you to catch specific exceptions and handle them accordingly. Here’s an example of how to catch an exception when using Shenandoah GC:

try {
    // Code that may throw exceptions during garbage collection with Shenandoah GC
} catch (ShenandoahException e) {
    // Handle the exception
    // Perform necessary actions to handle the exception gracefully
}

In the above code snippet, we have a try block containing the code that may throw exceptions during garbage collection with Shenandoah GC. If a ShenandoahException occurs, it will be caught in the catch block, where you can handle the exception appropriately.

3. Logging and Error Reporting

Another important aspect of exception handling and error handling with Shenandoah GC is logging and error reporting. When an exception or error occurs, it is essential to log the details of the exception for debugging purposes and to provide meaningful error messages to the user.

You can use logging frameworks like Log4j, Logback, or the built-in logging framework in your programming language to log the exceptions. Additionally, you can also integrate error reporting tools like Sentry or Bugsnag to automatically capture and report exceptions to your application’s error tracking system.

Conclusion

Handling exceptions and error handling with Shenandoah GC is crucial to ensure the stability and reliability of your application. By understanding the exception handling mechanism and using try-catch blocks, you can gracefully handle exceptions that may occur during garbage collection with Shenandoah GC. Remember to log and report errors for effective troubleshooting and debugging. Utilizing these techniques will help you build robust and resilient applications with the Shenandoah GC.