Error-handling utilities in LLVM

Error handling has always been a widely discussed topic in software development. It can be as simple as returning an error code—such as in many of the Linux APIs (for example, the open function)—or using an advanced mechanism such as throwing an exception, which has been widely adopted by many modern programming languages such as Java and C++.

Although C++ has built-in support for exception handling, LLVM does not adopt it in its code base at all. The rationale behind this decision is that despite its convenience and expressive syntax, exception handling in C++ comes at a high cost in terms of performance. Simply speaking, exception handling makes the original code more complicated and hinders a compiler's ability to optimize it. Furthermore, during runtime, the program usually needs to spend more time recovering from an exception. Therefore, LLVM disables exception handling by default in its code base and falls back to other ways...