[berkut]

You don't have to use exceptions in C++. You can do stuff the same way as in C by checking the return pointer.

I've worked on C++ apps that had built-in garbage collection (basically asset (geometry) paging) for huge amounts of data that would allocate/free/page on demand based on what was going on.

[axylone]

Sure, but then you can't use the standard library or any other libraries. Even a single exception sneaking into the codebase breaks everything.

[berkut]

We did - loads of Qt and std:: stuff - admittedly we used a custom memory allocator for the std:: stuff, but it worked fine.