Comment by hedora

Exceptions are fine if you never catch them. So is calling abort(). (Which is the Unix way to do what you described.)

If you need to handle errors, you quickly get into extremely complicated control flow that you now have to test:

   // all functions can throw, return nil or not.
   // All require cleanup.
   try {
      a = f();
      b = a.g();
   } catch(e) {
      c = h();
   } finally {
      if a cleanup_a() // can throw 
      if b cleanup_b() // null check doesn’t suffice…
      if c cleanup_c()
   }

Try mapping all the paths through that mess. It’s 6 lines of code. 4 paths can get into the catch block. 8 can get to finally. Finally multiplies that out by some annoying factor.