Exception handling is never free, despite some claims to the contrary on here. There is ALWAYS a cost whether it be memory or speed. If it has zero performance cost, there will be a high memory cost. Either way, the method used is totally compiler dependant and, therefore, out of the developers control. Neither method is good for game development since a. the target platform has a finite amount of memory that is often never enough and, therefore, we need total control over, and b. a fixed performance constraint of 30/60Hz. It's OK for a PC app or tool to slow down momentarily whilst something gets processed but this is absolutely untolerable on a console game. There are physics and graphics systems etc. that depend on a consistent framerate, so any C++ "feature" that could potentially disrupt this - and cannot be controlled by the developer - is a good candidate for being dropped. If C++ exception handling was so good, with little or no performance/memory cost, it would be used in every program, there wouldn't even be an option to disable it. The fact is, it may be a neat and tidy way to write reliable PC application code but is surplus to requirement in game development. It bulks out the executable, costs memory and/or performance and is totally unoptimizable. This is fine for PC dev that have huge instruction caches and the like, but game consoles do not have this luxury. And even if they did, the game dev community would almost certainly rather spend the extra cycles/memory on game related resources than waste it on features of C++ that we don't need.
