This is a common dogma in .net land. If we're being fair a more accurate statement would be "you currently get a performance penalty when you throw exceptions i

This is a common dogma in .net land. If we're being fair a more accurate statement would be "you currently get a performance penalty when you throw exceptions in Microsoft's implementation of .net". Exceptions are much faster in mono than Microsoft's .net[0], are much faster still in Java[0] and can be made as fast as goto in Java in some circumstances[1], particularly if you control the Exception class being thrown. Claiming Exceptions are slow is like saying "Java is slow". Languages and language features aren't slow, implementations are. [0] http://weblog.ikvm.net/PermaLink.aspx?guid=388b2a6d-e7b2-4ffa-86e7-450c87e6178f http://weblog.ikvm.net/PermaLink.aspx?guid=388b2a6d-e7b2-4ff... [1] http://blogs.oracle.com/jrose/entry/longjumps_considered_inexpensive http://blogs.oracle.com/jrose/entry/longjumps_considered_ine...