There's no register pressure - TEST EAX, EAX (or CMP, EAX, $0) // JNZ $ERROR_HANDLER is the instruction sequence we're talking about. Most error types are enum

There's no register pressure - TEST EAX, EAX (or CMP, EAX, $0) // JNZ $ERROR_HANDLER is the instruction sequence we're talking about. Most error types are enums where 0 = "good" and any nonzero value is not good. This is the inverse of the "null pointer check" in C. It consumes no registers and a negligible number of code bytes. There is obviously a sparsity of exceptional cases where error-handling code like this is worse than using exceptions. I would claim that it's a lot more sparse than you think. Many people use exceptions for things like "file not found" or "function failed for whatever reason," (my favorite) "timeout," or "bad input from the user." These cases are often not that exceptional!