Unless you care about performance. Exceptions have a performance benefit in that there's no cost if they are not thrown. With returning error values, every caller up the chain has to test the error condition.
We've used exactly for this reason to improve performance, albeit this was a long time ago.
Oh, another thing. There is nothing about Val that places it as a successor of C++ in any way. A C++ successor language starts by supporting interoperability with C++, at the source level. It didn't even attempt to do this.
This just looks like someone who likes Val wants it to be considered as a successor to the language, and not be overshadowed by CPP2 and Carbon.
My absolute favorite part of the article, which I'm going to steal in the future, is the disclaimer that translates any future failure of Val to a success: "if Val dies as a programming language but all its ideas are incorporated in C++, then I will be delighted."
It was obviously a click-bait as half-way through the article it was clearly written to promote Val, a language practically no one has heard of as compared to Carbon and CPP2. The click-bait worked. Val looks like a real contender, but now I'm forced to ignore it because of the dishonest means by which I was introduced to it :)
I'm waiting for someone to comment that because some programmer was lazy enough to use Go instead of C or C++, Tailscale module takes 16 MB, when the entire CheerpX VM was 6 MB. Just the stack is almost twice as big as the entire VM.
Why is it written in GO when it could have been written in C? Lazy programmers.
The problem with these alternative programming environments is that the developers push off everything other than compiling code. Then the community is left to struggle for years with:
1. How to debug in the language that they write in.
2. How to write unit tests.
3. How to debug unit tests.
4. Common IDE and code-editor integration for 1, 2 and 3.
5. What's the package management story?
For example, the newer programming environment that's released in most recent history that attempts to do an excellent job at this, Deno, still struggles with basics such as IDE integration for debugging unit tests. It's a struggle.
I've heard the creator of Clojure all but say he has put no thought into package management. Nice language, but it's not worth the cost of having to change how the rest of us work when there's existing environments that address the very basics that a developer needs.
We've used exactly for this reason to improve performance, albeit this was a long time ago.