When is it right for a constructor to throw an exception?

The constructor's job is to bring the object into a usable state. There are basically two schools of thought on this.

One group favors two-stage construction. The constructor merely brings the object into a sleeper state in which it refuses to do any work. There's an additional function that does the actual initialization.

I've never understood the reasoning behind this approach. I'm firmly in the group that supports one-stage construction, where the object is fully initialized and usable after construction.

One-stage constructors should throw if they fail to fully initialize the object. If the object cannot be initialized, it must not be allowed to exist, so the constructor must throw.

Eric Lippert says there are 4 kinds of exceptions.

• Fatal exceptions are not your fault, you cannot prevent them, and you cannot sensibly clean up from them.
• Boneheaded exceptions are your own darn fault, you could have prevented them and therefore they are bugs in your code.
• Vexing exceptions are the result of unfortunate design decisions. Vexing exceptions are thrown in a completely non-exceptional circumstance, and therefore must be caught and handled all the time.
• And finally, exogenous exceptions appear to be somewhat like vexing exceptions except that they are not the result of unfortunate design choices. Rather, they are the result of untidy external realities impinging upon your beautiful, crisp program logic.

Your constructor should never throw a fatal exception on its own, but code it executes may cause a fatal exception. Something like "out of memory" isn't something you can control, but if it occurs in a constructor, hey, it happens.

Boneheaded exceptions should never occur in any of your code, so they're right out.

Vexing exceptions (the example is Int32.Parse()) shouldn't be thrown by constructors, because they don't have non-exceptional circumstances.

Finally, exogenous exceptions should be avoided, but if you're doing something in your constructor that depends on external circumstances (like the network or filesystem), it would be appropriate to throw an exception.

Reference link: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ericlippert/2008/09/10/vexing-exceptions/

There is generally nothing to be gained by divorcing object initialization from construction. RAII is correct, a successful call to the constructor should either result in a fully initialized live object or it should fail, and ALL failures at any point in any code path should always throw an exception. You gain nothing by use of a separate init() method except additional complexity at some level. The ctor contract should be either it returns a functional valid object or it cleans up after itself and throws.

Consider, if you implement a separate init method, you still have to call it. It will still have the potential to throw exceptions, they still have to be handled and they virtually always have to be called immediately after the constructor anyway, except now you have 4 possible object states instead of 2 (IE, constructed, initialized, uninitialized, and failed vs just valid and non-existent).

In any case I've run across in 25 years of OO development cases where it seems like a separate init method would 'solve some problem' are design flaws. If you don't need an object NOW then you shouldn't be constructing it now, and if you do need it now then you need it initialized. KISS should always be the principle followed, along with the simple concept that the behavior, state, and API of any interface should reflect WHAT the object does, not HOW it does it, client code should not even be aware that the object has any kind of internal state that requires initialization, thus the init after pattern violates this principle.