The article discusses the hidden performance costs associated with using exceptions as a control flow tool. While they can make code cleaner and easier to read by removing error handling from the main logic, exceptions consume significant resources due to stack trace generation. This increases CPU load and memory requirements based on call stack depth. The article specifically highlights Scala's NoStackTrace trait, which efficiently manages exceptions without stack trace overhead, suggesting that similar considerations apply across various programming languages that process exceptions.
Creating exceptions can quietly hurt your performance. Many use exceptions as a control flow tool, which helps keep the happy path clean and move error handling where it fits better.
Exceptions are not free in terms of memory and performance. The JVM generates a stack trace when an exception is created, and this incurs CPU cost and increases memory usage.
In Scala, a common pattern for control-flow exceptions is to use NoStackTrace, a trait that avoids filling in the stack trace for efficiency reasons.
While this topic is primarily JVM-focused, any programming language that captures stack traces in exceptions will likely face similar performance issues.
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