Environment

All JRuby 9k versions up through current master (9.1).

Expected Behavior

We use exception handling in Ruby IR for dealing with missing methods and constants, defined?, frame and variable scope management. In general, most of this handling only occurs along method boundaries, routing logic to a per-method rescue block to clean up execution state. The try/catch tables in bytecode should reflect this.

Actual Behavior

Currently the JIT defines a trycatch in bytecode for each basic block that has an associated rescue block (including the global ensure block). This means that if a method has N basic blocks and a global ensure block, we will emit N trycatch into the bytecode. This may interfere with the JVM's optimizations, since according to several comments in this SO post the JVM can't optimize or reorder code across exception-handling boundaries: http://stackoverflow.com/a/16452100/152946

This needs confirmation, but more efficiently defining the trycatch blocks would still have value in reducing the complexity of the emitted bytecode.