[mmoll]

Most standard containers have no way to communicate allocation failure to the caller in the absence of exceptions (think of constructors that take a size). Worse, the implementations I’ve seen would eventually call operator new, assuming it would throw if it fails. That is, subsequent code would happily start copying data to the newly created buffer, without any further tests if that buffer is valid. In the absence of exceptions, that won’t work.

[TwentyPosts]

I guess my hope was that the program would just terminate immediately the instant it tries to throw an exception while -fno-exceptions is set, thus ideally preventing any further action from the program.

[isityouyesitsme]

What does it mean for a safety-critical program to terminate?

I suspect you do not want your car's brake controller to do this.