If that’s the only error mechanism, sure. Exceptions in most languages tend to be relatively expensive, though, and most have a cheaper idiomatic way of returning error codes; you’d want to use those if they’re available, right?

I think not being able to get the current time from the system is very exceptional. And I think exceptional circumstances should act that way and not “look like” normal executions. To me, that means letting hell break loose, and not “silently” return a 1 instead of a 0.

By similar reasoning, “Exceptions in most languages tend to be relatively expensive” is a very weak argument. We don’t expect this error-throwing code to execute a lot.