Reply To: Grab bag of questions

– 5) Exception handling
Mill has first class C++ exceptions in a way that is NYF (Not Yet Filed, sorry). The mechanism is also used for setjmp/longjmp. A consequence of the design is that exceptions work in the kernel code itself, and do not require trapping to recovery code nor use of the file system.

The facility is not entirely zero cost because there are setup and control instructions needed to define the exception environment and these do cost code space. However there is no latency cost if not thrown. The latency of a caught throw is roughly the same as the equivalent sequence of return instructions and destructor calls if directly executed, mostly due to mispredicts in the control flow of the exception path; there are no table searches or file lookups. The net result is that Mill exceptions are a practical control flow technique that can be used, and thrown, in performance critical and kernel code.