[pkmays]

I'm not C++ savvy, but I know from reading Google's C++ style guide that they also disable exceptions. The guide leaves it at that and doesn't say anything more about how to deal with errors. Does anyone here know how these big Google C++ codebases handle errors instead?

[andyjohnson0]

[The following is speculation: I have no access to Google's code.]

I can't think of any other way to handle errors apart from using return values. Methods return error codes which are handled by the caller or bubbled-up to its caller. This tends to result in lots of duplicated error handling code, and you have to either dedicate the return value to success/fail (which means you have to return non-status data some other way) or use special values to indicate failure.

The Go language (from Google) doesn't have exceptions and allows functions to return a value and an additional error return value [1]. I'd guess that this is inspired by their approach to C++ coding.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/go-wiki/wiki/Errors

[rb12345]

Isn't it possible to fake this with C++ templates? As an example, I created https://github.com/rb12345/cpp_annotated_return, which uses a templated struct to allow multiple value returns.