We do use try/catch in a few places. However, in normal operations (valid input), no exceptions are thrown - the try/catch blocks are present in certain validators but do not execute their catch clauses. AFAIK, modern engines generally don’t impose large steady-state penalties merely for the presence of a try/catch when no exception is thrown; the measurable cost is usually when exceptions are actually thrown. When an element/property fails, the catch is used to construct precise error paths. That’s intentionally trading some failure-path overhead for better developer diagnostics.

In the new few days, I'll prepare benchmarks to compare with Zod and Valibot!

The information I have on this could be outdated, so take this with a grain of salt, but it used to be the case that in hot code paths the presence of a try/catch would force a deoptimization whether or not you throw. The optimizing compiler in v8, for example, would specifically not run on any functions containing try/catch due to its inability to speculatively inline the optimized code. If you're feeling up to it, you can prove whether that is still the case with `d8 --allow-natives-syntax --trace-deopt ./your-script.js` and sprinkle in some `%OptimizeFunctionOnNextCall` in your code. I did a quick search for `try {` in the zod 4 source and didn't see anything, so I suspect that the performance issues surrounding try/catch are still at least somewhat around, unless they are simply avoiding try/catch for code cleanliness which could totally be the case. Regardless, I'd encourage you to look into whether plain old boolean return values in your validators would work for your project. Just include the `throw` part without all the `try/catch` and the code itself will likely be simpler, faster, and easy for the JIT to optimize. Good luck on those benchmarks.