> But with -fno-exceptions all exceptions cause a panic which stops execution of the program, right? plenty of cases where this isn't the case. -fno-exception

> But with -fno-exceptions all exceptions cause a panic which stops execution of the program, right? plenty of cases where this isn't the case. -fno-exceptions just means that you want to not be able to throw for your own code. -fno-unwind-tables / -fno-asynchronous-unwind-tables makes your own code un-unwindable which is only safe if you are in entire control of the whole codebase, which is very rare in anything that is not simple games - no plug-in system, or any dynamic code loading or JIT'ing is safe as you don't know which user-provided function you call is going to throw. Likewise, you could be in the opposite case: imagine you're making a C++ plug-in for, say, 3DS Max, where error reporting is done through exceptions ; even if your own plug-in code is built with -fno-exceptions and does not itself throw at any point, you still want exceptions that may be coming from a 3DSMax function you called to propagate to your code back to the exception handler provided by 3DS Max - and for this RAII of your own types is needed if you don't want your own resources to be leaked.