This is my first guest Friday Q&A article, dear readers, and I hope it will withstand your scrutiny. Today's topic is on Mach exception handlers, something I've recently spent some time exploring on Mac OS X and iOS for the purpose of crash reporting. While there is surprisingly little documentation available about Mach exception handlers, and they're considered by some to be a mystical source of mystery and power, the fact is that they're actually pretty simple to understand at a high level - something I hope to elucidate here. Unfortunately, they're also partially private API on iOS, despite being used in a number of new crash reporting solutions - something I'll touch on in the conclusion.

Happy April Fool's Day to all my readers, and welcome to one web site which won't irritate you all day with bizarre practical jokes. Instead, I bring you another edition of Friday Q&A. In this edition, I will discuss various ways of handling signals in Mac programs, a topic suggested by friend of the blog Landon Fuller.