It’s been more than a decade since I worked in games, but for my entire games career, any and all use of C++ exceptions was strictly disallowed due to other horror stories. I was still bit in a very similar way by someone’s C++ copy constructor trickery - a crash that only happened in a release build after playing the game for a while, with a stack corruption. Like the author, for me this was one of the hardest bugs I ever had to track down, and I ended up writing a tiny release mode debugger that logged call stacks in order to do it. Once I was able to catch the corruption (after several days of debugging during a crunch weekend), someone on my team noticed the stomp values looked like floating point numbers, and pretty quickly we figured out it was coming from the matrix class trying to be too clever with it’s reference counting IIRC. There’d been a team of around a dozen people trying to track this down during overtime, so it suddenly hit me once we fixed it that someone’s cute idea that took maybe 10 seconds to write cost several tens of thousands of dollars to fix.