I was up asking myself why error handling in Rust uses return values istead of exceptions and I found this explanation that I'm quoting here for my future self.

Some people need to use Rust in places where exceptions aren't allowed (because the unwind tables and cleanup code are too big). Those people include virtually all browser vendors and game developers. Furthermore, exceptions have this nasty codegen tradeoff. Either you make them zero-cost (as C++, Obj-C, and Swift compilers typically do), in which case throwing an exception is very expensive at runtime, or you make them non-zero-cost (as Java HotSpot and Go 6g/8g do), in which case you eat a performance penalty for every single try block (in Go, defer) even if no exception is thrown. For a language with RAII, every single stack object with a destructor forms an implicit try block, so this is impractical in practice.

The performance overhead of zero-cost exceptions is not a theoretical issue. I remember stories of Eclipse taking 30 seconds to start up when compiled with GCJ (which used zero-cost exceptions) because it throws thousands of exceptions while starting.

The C approach to error handling has a great performance and code size story relative to exceptions when you consider both the error and success paths, which is why systems code overwhelmingly prefers it. It has poor ergonomics and safety, however, which Rust addresses with Result. Rust's approach forms a hybrid that's designed to achieve the performance of C error handling while eliminating its gotchas.

~ pcwalton