Reply To: Execution

Yes, I was thinking about C++ style exceptions, not hardware faults. In particular, how this all works if your exception handler (i.e. catch) is several stack frames up from the place the exception was thrown. I doubt that’s implemented as a normal branch or return (tell me if I’m wrong). How are all the intervening stack frames unwound, the internal spiller-space state including the separate return-address stack, any not yet executed”tail-calls”? What happens to in-flight computation results that should be discarded, etc.? I imagine there must be a way for the compiler to tell the core to unwind all of that. Perhaps something similar to a facility for setjmp, longjmp (but not identical, I would imagine)?

I understand if this has to wait for a future talk, but it’s hard to resist asking questions. It’s like having access to your favorite author who has yet to publish the last volume of a trilogy. How do you not ask?