In a language without exceptions, I'm also assuming that a function conveys whether it can fail via it's prototype; in Rust, changing a function from "returns nothing" to "returns a Result" will result in a warning that you're not handling it

> What you're doing is simplifying code by making very strong assumptions on how it looks during initial authorship, and assuming the code will remain static throughout the lifetime of your own code.

But this is where the burden of exceptions is most pronounced; if you code as if everything can fail, there's no "additional" burden, you're paying it all the time. The case you're missing is in the simpler side, where it's possible for something to not fail, and that if that changes, your compiler tells you.

It can even become quite a great boon, because infallibility is transitive; if every operation you do can't fail, you can't fail.

To be very clear, I was explaining why, even if you somehow have a guarantee here that absolutely nothing ever fails, this code:

  stack.push_back(k);
  absl::Cleanup _ = [&] { assert(stack.back() == k); stack.pop_back(); }
  foo();
  bar();
  baz();
  return 3;

  stack.push_back(k);
  foo();
  bar();
  baz();
  assert(stack.back() == k);
  stack.pop_back();
  return 3;

>> The fact that it is next to the setup statement (i.e. locality of information) is extremely important from a code health and maintainability standpoint. Having setup & cleanup be a dozen lines away from each other makes it far too easy to miss or forget one of them when the other is modified. Putting them next to each other prevents them from going out of sync and diverging over time.

Fallibility is absolutely irrelevant to this point. It's about not splitting the source of truth into two separate spots in the code. This technique kills multiple birds at once, and handling errors better in the aforementioned cases is merely one of its benefits, but you should be doing it regardless.

Do you see what I mean?

For instance, this is the the scenario I expect to be harder to manage with exceptions & cleanup:

  this.len += 1;
  foo();
  this.len += 1;
  bar();
  this.len += 1;
  baz();
  return ...;

EDIT: sorry, had the len's in the wrong spot before

They're not. I've done this all the time, in the vast majority of cases it's perfectly fine. It sounds like you might not have tried this in practice -- I would recommend giving it a shot before judging it, it's quite an improvement in quality of life once you're used to it.

But in any large codebase you're going to find occasional situations complicated enough to obviate whatever generic solution anyone made for you. In the worst case you'll legitimately need gotos or inline assembly. That's life, nobody says everything has a canned solution. You can't make sweeping arguments about entire coding patterns just because you can come up with the edge cases.

> Without infallibility, you need a separate cleanup scope for each call you make.

So your goal here is to restore the length, and you're assuming everything is infallible (as inadvisable as that often is)? The solution is still pretty darn simple:

  absl::Cleanup _ = [&, old_len = len] { len = old_len; };
  foo();
  this.len += 1;
  bar();
  this.len += 1;
  baz();
  this.len += 1;
  return ...;

Your parenthetical is kind of my point though. It's rare to need mid-function cleanups that somehow contradict the earlier ones (because logically this often doesn't make sense), and when that is legitimately necessary, those are also fairly trivial to handle in most cases.

I'm happy to just agree to disagree and avoid providing more examples for this so we can lay the discussion to rest, so I'll leave with this: try all of these techniques -- not necessarily at work, but at least on other projects -- for a while and try to get familiar with their limitations (as well as how you'd have to work around them, if/when you encounter them) before you judge which ones are better or worse. Everything I can see mentioned here, I've tried in C++ for a while. This includes the static enforcement of error handling that you mentioned Rust has. (You can get it in C++ too, see [1].) Every technique has its limitations, and I know of some for this, but overall it's pretty decent and kills a lot of birds with one stone, making it worth the occasional cost in those rare scenarios. I can even think of other (stronger!) counterarguments I find more compelling against exceptions than the ones I see cited here, but even then I don't think they warrant avoiding exceptions entirely.

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that (a) sweeping generalizations are wrong regardless of the direction they're pointed at, as they often are (this statement itself being an exception), and (b) there's always room for improvement nevertheless, and I look forward to better techniques coming along that are superior to all the ones we've discussed.

[1] https://godbolt.org/z/c9KM6dj95