Fair point re: Zig vs Rust, but my larger point was about exceptions by any other name, in the linked article:

"Instead, when returning an error, rather than jumping to the return address, we look it up in the side table to find a corresponding error recovery address, and jump to that. Stack unwinding!

The bold claim is that unwinding is the optimal thing to do! .."

But it's not really encouraged as it is in C++ or Java. Quoting Rustonomicon: "There is an API called catch_unwind that enables catching a panic without spawning a thread. Still, we would encourage you to only do this sparingly. In particular, Rust's current unwinding implementation is heavily optimized for the "doesn't unwind" case. If a program doesn't unwind, there should be no runtime cost for the program being ready to unwind. As a consequence, actually unwinding will be more expensive than in e.g. Java. Don't build your programs to unwind under normal circumstances. Ideally, you should only panic for programming errors or extreme problems."

I would argue that is largely true because we got the ABIs and the hardware to support them to be highly optimized. Thing slow down very quickly if one gets off that hard-won autobahn of ABI efficiency.