[olliej]

I would like to have seen a comparison that actually includes -fno-exceptions, rather than just noexcept. My assumption is that to get a consistent gain from noexcept, you would need every function called to be explicitly noexcept, because a bunch of the cost of exceptions is code size and state required to support unwinding. So if the performance cost exception handling is causing is due to that, then if _anything_ can cause an exception (or I guess more accurately unless every opaque call is explicitly indicated to not cause an exception) then that overhead remains.

That said, I'm still confused by the perf results of the article, especially the perlin noise vs MSVC one. It's sufficiently weird outlier that it makes me wonder if something in the compiler has a noexcept path that adds checks that aren't usually on (i.e imagine the code has a "debug" mode that did bounds checks or something, but the function resolution you hit in the noexcept path always does the bounds check - I'm really not sure exactly how you'd get that to happen, but "non-default path was not benchmarked" is not exactly an uncommon occurrence)