I always hear this, but these days entire Linux distros build with -fasynchronous-unwind-tables which has much more overhead than C++ exceptions, since now you have to provide an unwind path for every single instruction boundary. Even Chrome does it (for "accurate stack traces") when otherwise they're on the no exceptions camp. Using this option also completely subsumes the otherwise negligible cost of C++ exceptions, which only affects non-inlined function calls (which already limit code motion anyway).