I prefer branching. Interrupt is inconvenient especially if you mean not panic and die but do some recovery. Conditional jump after arithmetic operation could b

I prefer branching. Interrupt is inconvenient especially if you mean not panic and die but do some recovery. Conditional jump after arithmetic operation could be as cheap as one instruction, branch prediction could make this instruction to cost almost nothing in terms of execution times (at least if overflows are a rare thing), and you could point this branch anywhere you like, so you could process overflow and try to recover from error without going outside of a current stack frame. It could be ugly in a high-level languages though. Instead of (a+b)*c you might get something like a.checked_add(b) .map(|x| x.checked_mul(c)) .flatten() .unwrap_or_else(|| do_something_to_recover(a, b, c)); At the same time there is nothing to forbid a syntax like: ((a⊕b)⊙c).flatten().unwrap_or_else(|| do_something to recover(a, b, c)); Just people do not like to use unicode in programming languages.