Often exceptions are used for program flow, although this is not recommended and violates the guidelines of exceptions in .NET.
Better alternatives like Result classes or OneOf are disregarded for convenience.
But what is the impact of using exceptions anyway?
BenchmarkDotNet v0.14.0, Windows 10 (10.0.19045.5131/22H2/2022Update)
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, 1 CPU, 32 logical and 16 physical cores
.NET SDK 9.0.100
[Host] : .NET 9.0.0 (9.0.24.52809), X64 RyuJIT AVX-512F+CD+BW+DQ+VL+VBMI
.NET 7.0 : .NET 7.0.20 (7.0.2024.26716), X64 RyuJIT AVX2
.NET 8.0 : .NET 8.0.11 (8.0.1124.51707), X64 RyuJIT AVX-512F+CD+BW+DQ+VL+VBMI
.NET 9.0 : .NET 9.0.0 (9.0.24.52809), X64 RyuJIT AVX-512F+CD+BW+DQ+VL+VBMI
| Method | Runtime | Mean | Error | StdDev | Ratio | RatioSD | Gen0 | Allocated |
|---------- |--------- |-------------:|----------:|----------:|---------:|--------:|-------:|----------:|
| Condition | .NET 7.0 | 11.495 ns | 0.0733 ns | 0.0612 ns | 10.30 | 0.06 | - | - |
| Condition | .NET 8.0 | 1.299 ns | 0.0041 ns | 0.0034 ns | 1.16 | 0.00 | - | - |
| Condition | .NET 9.0 | 1.116 ns | 0.0035 ns | 0.0031 ns | 1.00 | 0.00 | - | - |
| Exception | .NET 7.0 | 2,336.653 ns | 9.1249 ns | 8.5355 ns | 2,092.87 | 9.28 | 0.0114 | 232 B |
| Exception | .NET 8.0 | 2,303.988 ns | 2.6537 ns | 2.0719 ns | 2,063.61 | 5.80 | 0.0114 | 232 B |
| Exception | .NET 9.0 | 1,072.247 ns | 8.2707 ns | 7.3317 ns | 960.38 | 6.84 | 0.0134 | 224 B |- 🚀 Controlling logic via exceptions is expensive, inefficient and not smart. Doing away with exceptions is almost 500x faster and more efficient.
- With .NET 8, performance has improved in both cases, but in the case of Condition, .NET 8 is more than 20 times faster than .NET 7.
- With .NET 9, exception handling has become significantly more performant.
- Do not use exceptions to control your logic flow.
dotnet run -c Release --framework net9.0- 2023/11 - Add .NET 8
- 2024/11 - Add .NET 9