Correct me if I am wrong - but exceptions should not leave destructors. So you can throw them in destructors but you have to catch them there too - I think that is what the commenter you are replying to is getting at. So it has to be RAII because the destructor will not communicate up a hierarchy. This imposes a lot of overhead writing the destructor.

Further to the general theme of the thread - C++ compile times are bad, Go compile times are quite nice - I think this is significant when prototyping and testing units of code.