Re: [musl] add noexcept to all functions please

[James Y Knight <jyknight@google.com>]

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On Sat, Nov 6, 2021 at 2:40 PM Joakim Sindholt <opensource@zhasha.com>
wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 06, 2021 at 06:28:31PM +0000, Jon Chesterfield wrote:
> > That's a compiler bug, surely. A C function that takes no callbacks is
> not
> > going to throw.
>
> I don't think the compiler can prove that. As far as I know the extern
> "C" {} that C headers get wrapped in for C++ just means the compiler
> doesn't type-mangle function names. The function itself can not only
> throw by itself but it can also call other functions that throw as part
> of its implementation.


That's correct. In general, extern "C" functions are allowed to throw.


> If there's a compiler bug here it would have to be that it discards
> knowledge about C standard functions that can indeed not throw. I don't
> know if that's the case here, or if it's just nonstandard functions that
> are affected.


Some of the common standard functions are detected and treated specially by
compilers. Such libc functions that have special-casing are already
generally treated as non-throwing by both GCC and Clang. However, there are
a _lot_ of libc functions, both standard and nonstandard, that the compiler
doesn't hardcode any knowledge about.


> FWIW I don't think musl should tag any functions with anything just to
> make C++ marginally faster. This seems like a case of C++ getting
> hoisted by its own petard.
>

I have no horse in this race, but that really seems not a very helpful
attitude. There's a large number of users of libc who are using C++ rather
than C -- and many (most?) of them are compiling with exceptions enabled.
If adding minor cruft to all of the libc function declarations will make a
meaningful difference to all of that code's performance, that seems well
worth considering, regardless of anyone's opinions regarding decisions
about how to implement exceptions in C++ that were made 30 years ago.

Glibc defines macros for this purpose, which expand into "throw()" in C++
and "__attribute__((__nothrow__))" in GCC-C. The latter is only useful in
conjunction with an extremely-rarely-used feature, C code built with
-fexceptions enabled, and is thus probably ignorable.

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