try...catch slooowness?

[Walter Bright]

Michel Fortin wrote:
> Exceptions are slow, that's a fact of life. The idea is that an 
> exception should be exceptional, so the case to optimize for is the case 
> where you don't have any exception: a try...catch that doesn't throw. 
> Other ways to implement exceptions exists which are faster at throwing 
> (setjmp for instance), but they're also slower at entering and exiting a 
> try..catch block when no exception occur.

[...]

> Exceptions are recommended to avoid cluttering your normal code flow 
> with error handling code. Clearly, in the code above exceptions are part 
> of the normal code flow. That's not what exception are made for.

Right on all counts. Exceptions are for *exceptional* cases, i.e. unexpected 
errors, not normal control flow.

The implementation is designed so that the speed normal execution is strongly 
favored over speed of exception handling.