Shouldn't the advice of this article just be "use exceptions"?
Binary size (or maybe more accurately in this case, binary code layout) can be highly relevant for speed due to the instruction cache.
As for ease of development, there are issues with C++ exceptions regarding this as well: some C++ libraries aren't exception safe, and neither are practically all C libraries. This is something you need to worry about whenever you pass a function pointer into a library, as there might be an exception-unsafe function higher up in the stack. Propagating an exception up through it is potentially extremely dangerous.
That said, using exceptions can still be a good idea, especially if your code doesn't need to be portable or if you know the platforms in advance, and you are careful about passing around function pointers. All you need to do is ensure that any of your code that might be called from third-party code with questionable exception semantics won't throw or propagate any exceptions, e.g. by installing a catch-all exception handler in it.
I think the C++ implementation of exceptions has a lot to answer for though, in poisoning too many developers on the concept. It really is an awful implementation.
From the Gentoo wiki: -Os is very useful for large applications, like Firefox, as it will reduce load time, memory usage, cache misses, disk usage etc. Code compiled with -Os can be faster than -O2 or -O3 because of this. It's also recommended for older computers with a low amount of RAM, disk space or cache on the CPU. But beware that -Os is not as well tested as -O2 and might trigger compiler bugs.
I believe Apple compiles (a lot or all?) of their stuff with -Os.
Anyway C++ exceptions are awful. ;)
Size matters a lot because harddrives are stinkin' snails when compared to CPU and RAM. All that stuff needs to be loaded from somewhere, and while SSD's have changed the scheme a bit, there's still a major gap between storage and memory.
My 486 built in 1993 had 8 KB cache, 4 MB RAM, and a 120 MB HD.
My desktop built in 2009 has 2 MB cache, 2 GB RAM, and a 250 GB HD.
Okay, the cache has lagged behind by one or three doublings compared to the other storage types. But that's still pretty close to proportional in a world of exponential gains.
Here's a different take, then, and probably harder to verify, but I am guessing is true:
Cache utilization has increased much more than RAM or HD, not just because programs are handling more data but also because of increases in program size and number of programs being run simultaneously.
Your hard drive is probably not full... RAM could be, depends on your workload... but I bet most caches are churning like mad, more than they used to be.
http://seven-degrees-of-freedom.blogspot.com/2009/10/latency...
That "2 MB" is either L2 or L3, which your 486 didn't have.
The L1 on your desktop is not much larger than the only cache that your 486 had.
As frequency increases, the length of the path that a signal can travel in one clock decreases. Fortunately, cycle-time increases have been accompanied by transistor size decreases, so the net result is that L1 sizes have been roughly constant.