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Document number: N4049

Date: 2014-05-27

0-overhead-principle violations in exception handling

by Daniel Gutson, Angel Bustamante, Pablo Oliva, Marcos Diaz

Excerpt:

Sometimes the 0-overhead principle is not honored; one has to pay for things that are not used. An instance where this can be observed is the Exception Handling mechanisms implemented by the diverse toolchains.

In an average computing environment, this has little or no importance; the overhead is minimal and its impact is negligible.

But on embedded systems, where memory is scarce, the overhead imposed by unused language constructs can exceed the capabilities of the available hardware, as we will show is the case for exceptions.