Profit from noexcept with minimal effort [duplicate]

Question

The noexcept keyword can be appropriately applied to many function signatures, but I am unsure as to when I should consider using it in practice. Based on what I have read so far, the last-minute addition of noexcept seems to address some important issues that arise when move constructors throw. However, I am still unable to provide satisfactory answers to some practical questions that led me to read more about noexcept in the first place.

1. There are many examples of functions that I know will never throw, but for which the compiler cannot determine so on its own. Should I append noexcept to the function declaration in all such cases?

   Having to think about whether or not I need to append noexcept after every function declaration would greatly reduce programmer productivity (and frankly, would be a pain in the neck). For which situations should I be more careful about the use of noexcept, and for which situations can I get away with the implied noexcept(false)?

2. When can I realistically expect to observe a performance improvement after using noexcept? In particular, give an example of code for which a C++ compiler is able to generate better machine code after the addition of noexcept.

   Personally, I care about noexcept because of the increased freedom provided to the compiler to safely apply certain kinds of optimizations. Do modern compilers take advantage of noexcept in this way? If not, can I expect some of them to do so in the near future?

Answer 1

I think it is too early to give a "best practices" answer for this as there hasn't been enough time to use it in practice. If this was asked about throw specifiers right after they came out then the answers would be very different to now.

Having to think about whether or not I need to append noexcept after every function declaration would greatly reduce programmer productivity (and frankly, would be a pain).

Well, then use it when it's obvious that the function will never throw.

When can I realistically expect to observe a performance improvement after using noexcept? [...] Personally, I care about noexcept because of the increased freedom provided to the compiler to safely apply certain kinds of optimizations.

It seems like the biggest optimization gains are from user optimizations, not compiler ones due to the possibility of checking noexcept and overloading on it. Most compilers follow a no-penalty-if-you-don't-throw exception handling method, so I doubt it would change much (or anything) on the machine code level of your code, although perhaps reduce the binary size by removing the handling code.

Using noexcept in the big four (constructors, assignment, not destructors as they're already noexcept) will likely cause the best improvements as noexcept checks are 'common' in template code such as in std containers. For instance, std::vector won't use your class's move unless it's marked noexcept (or the compiler can deduce it otherwise).

Answer 2

As I keep repeating these days: semantics first.

Adding noexcept, noexcept(true) and noexcept(false) is first and foremost about semantics. It only incidentally condition a number of possible optimizations.

As a programmer reading code, the presence of noexcept is akin to that of const: it helps me better grok what may or may not happen. Therefore, it is worthwhile spending some time thinking about whether or not you know if the function will throw. For a reminder, any kind of dynamic memory allocation may throw.

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Okay, now on to the possible optimizations.

The most obvious optimizations are actually performed in the libraries. C++11 provides a number of traits that allows knowing whether a function is noexcept or not, and the Standard Library implementation themselves will use those traits to favor noexcept operations on the user-defined objects they manipulate, if possible. Such as move semantics.

The compiler may only shave a bit of fat (perhaps) from the exception handling data, because it has to take into account the fact that you may have lied. If a function marked noexcept does throw, then std::terminate is called.

These semantics were chosen for two reasons:

• immediately benefiting from noexcept even when dependencies do not use it already (backward compatibility)
• allowing the specification of noexcept when calling functions that may theoretically throw, but are not expected to for the given arguments