NSException rethrowing with wrong stack in the debugger

Question

When I crash (for reasons I understand; that's not the problem) when I try to do something Cocoa isn't okay with, such as calling a method that doesn't exist or attempting to insert nil into a set, the debugger shows the stack from main() to __pthread_kill, without any of the frames that were present when the actual crashing code ran. There is a frame (9th from main) called objc_exception_rethrow. This leads me to believe that Cocoa Touch is trying to do something or other to recover all exceptions and die gracefully or something. However, it is very irritating when debugging to not have the ability to actually use Xcode4's debugging tools to investigate the calling stack frames, or even see where in my code I crashed.

Is there some way to make the objc_exception_rethrow behavior not happen, and just crash as soon as an exception is raised? Perhaps there's a debug setting that makes it crash earlier (at the right time)? (I haven't messed with any of the build settings in this project yet.)

Answer 1

I found the answer: set a breakpoint on Obj-C Exceptions. It will go to the debugger when objc_exception_throw is hit, which is good. Unfortunately, this happens before the exception is printed, but we can make that happen anyway (most of the time) by setting the breakpoint's action to be (Debugger Action) po *(id *)($ebp + 8).

Answer 2

I don't know any Xcode setting that could disable re-throwing exceptions. To my knowledge they are re-thrown by the runtime. You could try running the app without the debugger attached and let it crash. The crash report should contain a section "Last Exception Backtrace" which will give you exactly what you need in this case.