One thing that I dislike is that it tries to be overly generic, i.e.

   try { throw 5; } catch (const int& val) { printf("%d\n", val); }
   try { throw "hello_world"; } catch (const char *&val) { puts(val); }

I think it would have been much better (and simpler for implementers!) if they had made std::exception a more fundamental part of the language and required that throw be used on a descendant of it. As it stands if you want to be sure to catch any failure from some external code you end up doing:

  try {
    something();
  } catch (const std::exception& ex) {
    fprintf(stderr, "ERROR: %s\n", ex.what());
  } catch (...) {
    fputs("UNKNOWN ERROR\n", stderr);
  }

My personal opinion is that it's easier to deal with C++ exceptions (warts and all) than to try to avoid them. Just about any method that mutates a STL type can have a heap allocation fail and the only reasonable way to report that is via "throw std::bad_alloc();". Just make sure that your code always follows the principals of RAII ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAII ) and you'll be fine.