alt Hacker News> "In low-level systems software, which is a primary use case for C++, exceptions can introduce nasty edge cases that are difficult to detect and reason about. The benefits are too small to justify the costs to reliability, robustness, and maintainability."
Interestingly, Microsoft C / C++ compiler does support structured exception handling (SEH). It's used even in NT kernel and drivers. I'm not saying it's the same thing as C++ exceptions, since it's designed primarily for handling hardware faults and is simplified, but still shares some core principles (guarded region, stack unwinding, etc). So a limited version of exception handling can work fine even in a thing like an OS kernel.
FWIW, I think it is possible to make exception-like error handling work. A lot of systems code has infrastructure that looks like an exception handling framework if you squint.
There are two main limitations. Currently, the compiler has no idea what can be safely unwound. You could likely annotate objects to provide this information. Second, there is currently no way to tell the compiler what to do with an object in the call stack may not be unwound safely.
A lot of error handling code in C++ systems code essentially provides this but C++ exceptions can't use any of this information so it is applied manually.