Comment by jandrewrogers

> That's true, except for languages that ensure you can't simply forget that something deep down the stack can throw an exception.

Sometimes it is not safe to unwind the stack. The language is not relevant. Not everything that touches your address space is your code or your process.

Exception handlers must have logic and infrastructure to detect these unsafe conditions and then rewrite the control flow to avoid the unsafety. This both adds overhead to the non-exceptional happy path and makes the code flow significantly uglier.

The underlying cause still exists when you don't use exceptions but the code for reasoning about it is highly localized and usually has no overhead because you already have the necessary context to deal with it cleanly.