I made a website where you can measure these things in both time and instructions. It's not perfect because it's a VM, but at least you can see for yourself the

I made a website where you can measure these things in both time and instructions. It's not perfect because it's a VM, but at least you can see for yourself the horror show that is the first exception thrown. And also the bloat that exceptions add. I still use exceptions simply because they are part of the language, although sparingly. But I have a gut feeling that the implementation of C++ exceptions in the current compilers, and the ABI, is just subpar. It has to be, because nothing that isn't a context switch should be measured in hundreds of thousands of instructions. See: https://droplet.fwsnet.net https://droplet.fwsnet.net Just experiment with adding and removing exceptions, and compare it. It's shocking. Hello world using printf: Instruction count: 14988 Binary size: 345 KB Hello world try->throw->catch (and printf): Instruction count: 286926 Binary size: 397 KB Hello world using std::cout: Instruction count: 63502 Binary size: 888 KB