exceptions in C++

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Exceptions are people feel what they don't understand, right? And people don't understand exceptions. Um, like, um, modern architecture, I guess, or most most operating systems or platforms that you're using them on, they are basically free to not throw, but expensive to throw.

[00:00:16]Um, at which point you are probably on the unhappy path anyway. So, the extra, uh, runtime overhead, I would say, is generally irrelevant to the uh, simplicity that you'll get in the code. That being said, like, if you are in, like, a hot loop somewhere, then they may not be suitable. Everything, you know, be pragmatic about everything. But, if you're in a hot loop, you're probably making other concessions anyway. You're probably not using malloc. You're probably doing other things. So, yeah, that that code, that highly optimized hot loop, might look different to the rest of your code anyway. However, as a way of decoupling the code that produces the error from the code that handles the error, I think exceptions are the correct choice.