Re: exception handling and optimization papers?

Jason Merrill <jason@cygnus.com> writes on 1998-09-05:
> [The August 98 SIGPLAN Notices article "Optimizing Away C++ Exception
> Handling"] essentially deals with the obvious (though not yet ubiquitous)
> optimization of using throw() specs to determine that a call will not throw,
> and removing exception regions that don't contain anything that can throw.


As the humble author of the paper in question, I concur with your
assessment that the techniques involved are not quite revolutionary
:-) The paper also gives some hard numbers for EH overhead due to one
compiler (SCO's) for a bunch of publicly available sources - I found
such hard numbers very rare in the available literature. Lastly I
instrumented all the sources to use throw()'s - since few if any
existing sources use it - to see whether that allowed the compiler to
generate better code (the answer was, sometimes).


--
Jonathan Schilling SCO, Inc. jls@sco.com
--

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