No, this holds in a fair comparison with manual error checking. In the presence of possible exceptions, the compiler has to make the assumption that any nontriv

No, this holds in a fair comparison with manual error checking. In the presence of possible exceptions, the compiler has to make the assumption that any nontrivial expression can throw, especially if its implementation is opaque at the callsite. With explicit error handling, this is reduced to those checkpoints that are inserted manually, which are generally fewer. If you call a function within the condition of an if statement, the compiler needs to conservatively assume that the execution flow from there is either to the rest of the conditionsl or to either one of the catch blocks or the functions' stack unwinding. If there cannot be an exception, the execution flow has none of these additional branches that bog down the DFA.