> Exceptions complicate mostly everything, so the best thing to do is to turn them off and not rely on anything that uses them, for example.

Look forward to all your users ignoring your return codes and never calling valid() on your objects that can only signal construction failed that way.

Also the impact of exceptions on performance is overblown, even in high perf situations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20342183

Throwing is slow, but throwing is supposed to be rare. Don't use it as flow control.