Giant Try Catch Block in Main

Question

I have a class that can throw an exception inside the constructor. I do not know own the code for this class so I cannot change this behavior or add other instantiation or initialization methods to this class. I need to create an object of this class inside of main. Does this mean that I need to have a main() that consists mostly of one giant try / catch block like this:

main()
{
  try
  {
    A a;
    ...
  }
  catch(std::exception& e)
  {
    std::cout << e.what() << std::endl;
    return EXIT_FAILURE;
  }
  return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

What if this main is thousands of lines long? This try / catch block is huge. I feel like there should be a better way of doing this but I cannot think of one.

Answer 1

What if this main is thousands of lines long?
... I feel like there should be a better way of doing this but I cannot think of one.

That's clearly a sign for bad design and should be refactored into classes and function calls.

Ideally to something like this in main():

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
    try {
        Application app(argc,argv);
        app.run();
    }
    catch(std::exception& e) {
         std::cout << e.what() << std::endl;
         return EXIT_FAILURE;
    }
    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}      

Still the

try {
    // Refactored 1000 lines of code
}
catch(std::exception& e) {
    std::cout << e.what() << std::endl;
    return EXIT_FAILURE;
}

must enclose the calling code.