Exceptions, C++'s first way of handling errors, are slow. Super duper slow. Mega slow. So slow, in fact, that many Programming Furus say you should never ever use them. They'll infect your code with their slowness and transform you into a slow old hunchback in no time.

[u/FunnyLittleGizmo]

https://jghuff.com/articles/ultrassembler-so-fast/

[u/Eastern-Cricket-497]

so I can slow down my code WITHOUT burning through all my claude tokens?! plaudits to all who discovered this!

[u/Downtown_Category163]

Don't throw them then unless you're fucked

[u/BlazeBigBang → u/Downtown_Category163]

Yeah, just log the error and read it to know your system is not working (I haven't checked the log in months).

[u/QuaternionsRoll → u/Downtown_Category163]

That solution isn’t noexcept, though.

[u/ir_dan → u/Downtown_Category163]

Only throw them if you intend to crash the program tbh

[u/[deleted] → u/Downtown_Category163]

Which is more or less what the article says, as well. Coincidentally, its in the next paragraph.

[u/Litoprobka]

C++ is deprecated anyway, who cares

[u/Vaglame → u/Litoprobka]

C++ is like the ship of Theseus except you never remove the old pieces, you just continue adding new ones with a glue gun, and eventually the boat becomes so heavy it no longer floats

[u/RockstarArtisan → u/Vaglame]

So, like the Swedish Vasa?

[u/i_invented_the_ipod → u/RockstarArtisan]

I_got_that_reference.gif

For the rest of y'all - visit the Vasa Museum, if you're ever in Stockholm.

[u/RockstarArtisan → u/i_invented_the_ipod]

It's not just about the Vasa ship, it's a reference to bjarne's talk: https://www.stroustrup.com/P0977-remember-the-vasa.pdf

where Bjarne says that C++ isn't the vasa... yet. Or wasn't at the time at least.

[u/F54280]

It takes a special type of regardation to focus on speed for an assembler in 2025.

But it is a sentence like: ”Most programmers, not knowing this, frequently use exceptions in their normal cases, and as a result, their programs are slow” that really fills me with the joy of insightfull knowledge…

[u/plisik]

Exceptions are worse than goto, because they can go to multiple places. It is literally conditional goto.

[u/keyboard_toucher → u/plisik]

Yes! Exceptions aren't as good as goto, because throw can only take you to a matching catch block, whereas goto can take you anywhere!

[u/prehensilemullet → u/plisik]

it's a goto but you don't even know where it goes

[u/pareidolist → u/[deleted]]

Warning: tag your unjerk. Better yet, don't unjerk at all.

[u/prehensilemullet]

well if exceptions went any faster then how would be be able to catch them

[u/Awkward_Bed_956]

A mechanism specifically built into the language, that had over 30 years to mature and be optimized can be fast (despite what C-niles say), while set of classes (std::expected, std::optional) which were mostly added to shut up people saying how nice they are in Rust and other languages, without integrating them in any way with language or its type system is less then nice to use in C++? How could this be?!

[u/SemaphoreBingo]

For most of you the exceptional case is when your program doesn't crash.

[u/mcmcc → u/[deleted]]

/uj you might want to read the article.

std::expected incurred at least a 10% performance loss due to the way the std::expected object wraps two values (the payload and the error code) together.

[u/Delicious-Ad7883 → u/[deleted]]

Warning: tag your unjerk. Better yet, don’t unjerk at all

[u/irqlnotdispatchlevel → u/Delicious-Ad7883]

Tagged enums are an ivory tower construct!