[vacuity]

There's indeed a predictably present cost for checking for failure all the time. Exceptions, depending on the implementation, often do come with runtime overhead too. If the determining factor is a slight performance gain of exceptions over ubiquitous checking, that would be an exceptional (ha) case. I daresay there are almost always other more salient factors, if harder to rearchitect around.

[binary132]

AIUI most implementations of exceptions only carry a cost on unwind, but I'm not the expert here.