I'd be interested in seeing some of these mechanisms because I'm used to using exceptions in my hobby/tool code, and dealing with return codes/error codes at work. If you aren't using an exception, then you're propagating an error code yourself (or ignoring it).

Monads (C++'s IOStreams uses this approach), algebraic return types (only partially-doable in C++, but usable), continuations, callbacks, ignore, explicit fallbacks, isolate termination, abort(), etc. There's tons. None of which impose the kinds of maintenance, debugging, implementation, and runtime overheads of exceptions.