'try' is relatively slow compared to other control logic, as allowing an exception to be thrown involves constructing an exception stack trace. This is slow in all VMs I know. Theoretically you could detect that the trace isn't used and remove it through escape analysis, but this is not easy, or you could do some crazy thing with lazily creating the stack trace, but that's a research project.

Not him, but I try to use patterns that are portable outside Rails where possible.