Plausible CrashReporter provides support for executing an application specified function in the context of the crash reporter's signal handler, after the crash report has been written to disk. This was a regularly requested feature, and provides the ability to implement application finalization in the event of a crash. However, writing code intended for execution inside of a signal handler is exceptionally difficult, and is not recommended.

Program Flow and Signal Handlers

When the signal handler is called the normal flow of the program is interrupted, and your program is an unknown state. Locks may be held, the heap may be corrupt (or in the process of being updated), and your signal handler may invoke a function that was being executed at the time of the signal. This may result in deadlocks, data corruption, and program termination.

Async-Safe Functions

A subset of functions are defined to be async-safe by the OS, and are safely callable from within a signal handler. If you do implement a custom post-crash handler, it must be async-safe. A table of POSIX-defined async-safe functions and additional information is available from the CERT programming guide - SIG30-C

Most notably, the Objective-C runtime itself is not async-safe, and Objective-C may not be used within a signal handler.

See Also

PLCrashReporter::setCrashCallbacks: