Debug vs. release builds won’t matter, and the various /EH types don’t matter either. I was surprised by this as well, but even if GCC is generally 4x faster at exception handling (and not just for this simple test), imho exception handling speed shouldn’t matter unless you’re abusing exceptions for something they weren’t made for (and considering that VC++ generally optimizes better than GCC, well…)
I threw together a little test package: http://f0dder.reteam.org/misc/throw_speed.zip
Interesting thing is that on 64bit XP, it seems like kernel32.RaiseException doesn’t go userkernel, but is still very slow (slower than 32bit with userkernel it would seem, but I don’t have XP32 on this box to test). Since testing was done with 32bit exe, it shouldn’t be because of extra registers needing to be saved, etc. With 64bit exe, things are bad.
32bit Vista, Turion-64-X2 TL-60 (2.00GHz)
throw_vc: 8174 ms kernel, 7316 ms user, 5000000 exceptions
throw_gcc: 0 ms kernel, 5350 ms user, 5000000 exceptions
64bit XP, AMD64x2 4400+ (2.21GHz)
throw_vc: 0 ms kernel, 7296 ms user, 5000000 exceptions
throw_gcc: 0 ms kernel, 2968 ms user, 5000000 exceptions
throw_x64: 0 ms kernel, 24437 ms user, 5000000 exceptions