What is difference between sjlj vs dwarf vs seh

Question

I can t find enough information to decide which compiler should I use to compile my project  There are several programs on different computers simulating a process  On Linux  I m using GCC  Everything is great  I can optimize code  it compiles fast and uses not-so-much memory    I do my own benchmark with MSVC and GCC compilers  Later one produces slightly faster binaries  for each subarchitecture   Though compile time is much more than MSVC    So I decided to use MinGW  But can t find any explanation about exception handling methods and their implementations in MinGW  I can use different distributions for different operating systems and architectures    Considerations     Compile time and memory are not important for my usage  Only important thing is runtime optimization  I need my programs to be fast enough  A slow compiler is acceptable   OS  Microsoft Windows XP   7   8   Linux Architecture  Intel Core i7   Core2   and a very old i686 running XP  P

User · Accepted Answer

There s a short overview at MinGW-w64 Wiki      Why doesn t mingw-w64 gcc support Dwarf-2 Exception Handling       The Dwarf-2 EH implementation for Windows is not designed at all to   work under 64-bit Windows applications  In win32 mode  the exception   unwind handler cannot propagate through non-dw2 aware code  this means   that any exception going through any non-dw2 aware  foreign frames    code will fail  including Windows system DLLs and DLLs built with   Visual Studio  Dwarf-2 unwinding code in gcc inspects the x86   unwinding assembly and is unable to proceed without other dwarf-2   unwind information       The SetJump LongJump method of exception handling works for most   cases on both win32 and win64  except for general protection faults    Structured exception handling support in gcc is being developed to   overcome the weaknesses of dw2 and sjlj  On win64  the   unwind-information are placed in xdata-section and there is the  pdata    function descriptor table  instead of the stack  For win32  the chain   of handlers are on stack and need to be saved restored by real   executed code    GCC GNU about Exception Handling      GCC supports two methods for exception handling  EH           DWARF-2  DW2  EH  which requires the use of DWARF-2  or DWARF-3  debugging information  DW-2 EH can cause executables to be   slightly bloated because large call stack unwinding tables have to be   included in th executables    A method based on setjmp longjmp  SJLJ   SJLJ-based EH is much slower than DW2 EH  penalising even normal execution when no   exceptions are thrown   but can work across code that has not been   compiled with GCC or that does not have call-stack unwinding   information                       Structured Exception Handling  SEH         Windows uses its own exception handling mechanism known as Structured Exception Handling  SEH           Unfortunately  GCC does not support SEH yet          See also    Exception handling models of GCC C   Exception Handling for IA-64 EH newbies howto

User · Answer

SJLJ  setjmp longjmp       available for 32 bit and 64 bit     not    zero-cost     even if an exception isn   t thrown  it incurs a minor performance penalty   15  in exception heavy code      allows exceptions to traverse through e g  windows callbacks DWARF  DW2  dwarf-2      available for 32 bit only     no permanent runtime overhead     needs whole call stack to be dwarf-enabled  which means exceptions cannot be thrown over e g  Windows system DLLs  SEH  zero overhead exception      will be available for 64-bit GCC 4 8   source  https   wiki qt io MinGW-64-bit

[c++] What is difference between sjlj vs dwarf vs seh?

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