This is one of my basic interview questions to candidates and it is amazing how many people have no idea how exceptions work or how much they cost.
Back in 2005, I was involved in a replatforming of the legacy COBOL and TRANSACT HP3000 mainframe codebase to the modern system. The code was transpiled into an [unholy mess of] C# and ASP.NET. The Transact code was extremely procedural and had mainframe forms interspread in it. Each block of code that ran between the form display and wait for input block turned into a function in C#, and all of them were chained in the main function with gotos. To get out of the function, the transpiled code would throw new Exception("with some custom message indicating step to go to next"), it'll be caught upstack, message parsed and then goto'ed to that. So yeah, control flow with Exceptions
I am shuddering just thinking about it now, it was impossible to read. Under medium load - and I was in charge of load testing - it threw some astronomical numbers of exceptions/sec and it was just so ugly.
Try as I might I couldn't dissuade them to change the ways they returned from the function. It all went to production. The customer just threw really big machines and lots of them and they just exceptioned all day long.
Back in 2005, I was involved in a replatforming of the legacy COBOL and TRANSACT HP3000 mainframe codebase to the modern system. The code was transpiled into an [unholy mess of] C# and ASP.NET. The Transact code was extremely procedural and had mainframe forms interspread in it. Each block of code that ran between the form display and wait for input block turned into a function in C#, and all of them were chained in the main function with gotos. To get out of the function, the transpiled code would throw new Exception("with some custom message indicating step to go to next"), it'll be caught upstack, message parsed and then goto'ed to that. So yeah, control flow with Exceptions
I am shuddering just thinking about it now, it was impossible to read. Under medium load - and I was in charge of load testing - it threw some astronomical numbers of exceptions/sec and it was just so ugly.
Try as I might I couldn't dissuade them to change the ways they returned from the function. It all went to production. The customer just threw really big machines and lots of them and they just exceptioned all day long.