In C++, if you run into an error and you know how to handle it, you handle it. This is exactly the same as C. Exceptions are only there for when you don't know how to handle an error. Instead of calling exit(), you throw an exception and hope that someone further up the stack can do something useful. By default, your program terminates, just like exit... but all your destructors get called, so you don't leak database handles or locks or other resources. Nice.

I've read the Google C++ style guide and it's basically a joke. At least it was a joke two years ago. The guide even contradicted itself in multiple places. Google bends over backwards to avoid using exceptions and the result is that C++ isn't C++ anymore.