I hope we can all agree that we want the overwhelming majority of the lines of code we write, and of the cycles our programs execute, to be about solving an act

I hope we can all agree that we want the overwhelming majority of the lines of code we write, and of the cycles our programs execute, to be about solving an actual problem representing the purpose the program was written. Lines and cycles fooling with internal junk are overhead, waste. And, we want our functions to be small, do one thing, and be easily composed. The problem with Result and their ilk is that they pile on overhead at function-call boundaries, exactly the place where you need design to be fluid. The great insight behind C++ was that cleanup, packaged and applied automatically, eliminates opportunities for mistakes, freeing up our attention. Exceptions apply that to error handling by running the same, well tested code when errors happen, and gathering error events to a place where we are equipped to do something useful about them. Now that we often don't even need to code destructors anymore -- the compiler does it better -- our attention is freed for real-world problems. And, not needing to worry about propagating errors up the stack, we can focus on arguments and control moving down and results up. Attention is easiest to manage in a small program. There just isn't as much to think about. In a big program, with many people involved, it costs a lot more to deal with extra junk, choices about how to bubble errors out. Structuring error handling into destructors and exceptions provides a common framework that burns no discussion time. Everybody gets to concentrate on solving the actual problem, without distraction by incidentals. We would not be having this discussion if Google had not imposed its rule banning exceptions, which we know was imposed just to accommodate legacy code that did not have destructors. Now they have a thousand times as much code, still without good destructors. Wouldn't it have been less work to fix that code, then, than to impose its costs on everyone today?