FB7517603: Add ability to catch Objective-C runtime exceptions in Swift

[sindresorhus]

• Date: 2020-01-02
• Resolution: Open
• Area: Swift Compiler
• OS: macOS 10.15.2
• Type: Suggestion

Description

Many Cocoa APIs still throw Objective-C exceptions at runtime. These are impossible to catch in Swift. There are ways to do it by creating an exception catch handler in Objective-C and then use it in Swift, but I prefer to not have any Objective-C code in my projects.

The API could be something like this:

do {
    try ObjC.catchException {
        // Call something here that might throw an NSException.
    }
} catch {
    print("An error occurred: \(error)")
}

As you can see from the votes on this Stack Overflow question, it's a common need: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32758811/catching-nsexception-in-swift

[sindresorhus]

Swift package for this: https://github.com/sindresorhus/ExceptionCatcher