Re:Memory management in C programs (2014)
by cmrdporcupine on Monday July 18, 2016 @11:24PM
(#12119360)
I don't think it's a secret that Google's C++ code base (very large and growing) does not use exceptions. And since starting there I have not missed them. Exceptions make execution flow hard to reason about. And RAII is most certainly still a thing without exceptions. There's lots of other ways to unwind the stack.
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Google is an example that writing production code that doesn't use exceptions is possible, not that this is the right thing to do.
They said that their decision was primarily legacy-motivated (in short, they were fearing that introducing exceptions in a non-RAII codebase would lead us to a long period of instability).
I'll add that in some situations (e.g when freeing resources) the control flow gets very convoluted, and you don't want to deal with directly. See: Andrei Alexandrescu - Declarative Control Flow ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjTrfoiB0MQ )