I'm no C++ fan (anymore), either, but I don't understand Carmack's taking exception with exceptions. If the alternative is guarding every function call with an if statement to check for error codes, I'll take exceptions almost every time. (Many game programmers I know think that checking for errors is usually bad game programming style, period, but I'm assuming Carmack isn't one of those people.)
Exceptions do have possibly deleterious effects on performance, but then, you can just be judicious about where you use them. Exceptions are at least appropriate for catastrophic failures like, "Oops, the game just crashed," or, "Your network connection died." Thinking about manually unwinding out of a game-over failure like that makes me grimace.
Exceptions do have possibly deleterious effects on performance, but then, you can just be judicious about where you use them. Exceptions are at least appropriate for catastrophic failures like, "Oops, the game just crashed," or, "Your network connection died." Thinking about manually unwinding out of a game-over failure like that makes me grimace.
Sigh, game programmers. :)