Very, very few people have to think about unwind safety, because it really only comes into play when you're writing unsafe code, and relying on the ability for panics to be caught. Many folks aren't writing any unsafe, and many who are are doing it explicitly in a panic=abort environment. And most don't rely on panics being able to be caught in the first place.

So, some subset of library authors have to pay attention to unwind safety in some cases. This is hardly "everyone."

> pays the syntactic

It's one character.

> and runtime costs of error code checking,

Exceptions also have runtime costs. I'm not aware of anything demonstrating that there is a really major difference between the two in real systems. I would be interested in reading more about this! Most of the discussion I've seen focuses on microbenchmarks, which can be very different than real code.

> pays the runtime cost of unwind tables,

Only if you want them, as you yourself mention, you can turn this off. And many do.

The Rust way of dealing with errors is to return a Result<> and in my experience it's the best system I've used. It doesn't have the code flow breaking aspect of exceptions while being a lot nicer and less error-prone than C or Go style error handling.

I happen to like exceptions in principle, but for a lot of low-level embedded code they're a deal breaker.