That said, I've spent too much of my life chasing implicit control flow to accept exceptions. Heck, C++'s "noexcept" is a strong argument against exceptions all by itself.
Yes. This is why unchecked exceptions are annoying. Checked exceptions are a „failed experiment“ anyway.
A result type (or even Go‘s err) with forced error handling meaningfully increases the robustness of a program in my experience.
I haven't written any Java since it has gained those, so I suspect there might be other aspects making it awkward. And it still would lack exhaustiveness checking that e.g. Rust has.
Unchecked exceptions lead to unhandled exceptions at runtime. We've all seen screens with Java programs running with tons of exceptions in the log, or worse, that crash with unhandled exceptions. This is the result of the unchecked exceptions mess, which is why I won't use languages that use them for routine error handling for anything more than trivial programs.
Exception handling is just annoying from a syntax perspective. Also checked Exceptions have the problem that they bubble up types that a different layer shouldn’t even be aware of due to exception chaining (cause of a cause etc), unless you carefully re-throw them, which nobody did.
Lower ceremony errors are just better to deal with.
> result types pessimize code more
> They're arguably noisier at the source level too.
Exceptions came to be during the 1990's, as the C++ARM to C++98 standardisation process was taking place.
Naturally during the early days C++ compilers lacked exceptions, as CFront was introduced without them.
Then we had the C folks that were migrating to C++.
When C++ compilers finally supported exception, compilers vendors introduced the non standard switch to disable them, so that existing code could still compile with the expected behaviour.
The standard itself does not acknowledge this as allowed.
This feature was naturally misused by the anti-exception folks, same applies to how RTTI came to be.
So noexcept is a way to be able to write code to appease both camps, while surfacing what variant was chosen by the programmer.
From my point of view allowing disabling exceptions in first place was a mistake, those folks should have moved back to C, or fixed their code.