Comment by jandrewrogers

FWIW, I think it is possible to make exception-like error handling work. A lot of systems code has infrastructure that looks like an exception handling framework if you squint.

There are two main limitations. Currently, the compiler has no idea what can be safely unwound. You could likely annotate objects to provide this information. Second, there is currently no way to tell the compiler what to do with an object in the call stack may not be unwound safely.

A lot of error handling code in C++ systems code essentially provides this but C++ exceptions can't use any of this information so it is applied manually.