[Murk]

When I went for a job interview at Symbian many years ago for a position working on Symbian OS, they told me (and it's obvious from looking at their documentation) that they implemented thier own execption mechanism in C++ using setjmp and longjmp becuase they deemed that the C++ execption system was too slow. Other accounts say that the exception mechanism wasn't present in the language at the time, which I am not sure of.

This is why you had to push all local variables onto a clearnup list in each an every function, this I think, from memory was a call to CleanupStack::Push with a wrapper macro.

If indeed they did this becuase exxceptions were 'too slow', then the problem, im my option would be that they were using exceptions far too much -- as status indications and so on. They are, again, in my option a great help used in the right way, with the C++ RAII idiom, which is essential in the face of exceptions.