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Possible Duplicate:
How to profile the performance overhead of exception handling
Performance when exceptions are not thrown (C++)
What is the performance overhead of try/catch blocks?
I have heard anecdotally that using "try" blocks in C++ slows down the code at run-time even if no exceptions occur. I have searched but have been unable to find any explanation or substantiation for this. Does anyone know if this is true & if so why?
The answer, as usually, is “it depends”.
It depends on how exception handling is implemented by your compiler.
If you’re using MSVC and targeting 32-bit Windows, it uses a stack-based mechanism, which requires some setup code every time you enter a try block, so yes, that means you incur a penalty any time you enter such a block, even if no exception is thrown.
Practically every other platform (other compilers, as well as MSVC targeting 64-bit Windows) use a table-based approach where some static tables are generated at compile-time, and when an exception is thrown, a simple table lookup is performed, and no setup code has to be injected into the try blocks.