Error Handling in C++: Why You Should Use Eithers, Not Exceptions or Error-Codes

This has come up before [0], quite recently, though not this particular article.

Some of the points that stood out to me, in opposition of the article's "this way is better":

* Exceptions are usually free if not thrown... If they are thrown... You're in an error path. You don't usually care about speed.

There's a long list of problems here [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14316539

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14321083

shouldn't an optimization like this be performed by compilers?