Re: performance of exception handling

[Thomas Neumann <tneumann@users.sourceforge.net>]

> Some people use exceptions to propagate "low memory" up which
> made me increase the size of the EH emergency pool (which is
> used when malloc cannot even allocate the EH data itself) ...
> 
> So yes, people care.  There absolutely has to be a path in
> unwinding that allocates no (as little as possible) memory.

note that I would not allocate at all in the unwinding path. I would
allocate memory when new frames are registered, but unwinding would be
without any allocations.

Of course there is a trade-off here. We could delay allocating the
lookup structures until the first exception occurs, in order to speed up
programs that never throw any exceptions. But that would effectively
force us to implement a "no memory" fallback, for exactly the reason you
gave, as something like bad_alloc might be the first exception that we
encounter.

Thomas