review use of, and handling of, exceptions

[tap]

For the use of exceptions to work it takes a lot of discipline -- which does not describe how we've approached this in the past.

First, we need a review of what we are doing.
Second, we need a strategy for what we want to be doing.
Finally, we should see if there are any tools or new things in C++11/14 that help us to manage this in a sane way.

[jcelerier]

About facilities provided by modern C++, there is the noexcept keyword which allows the compiler to optimize away some stuff : http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/noexcept_spec and also ensures to the user of the API where an exception would or would not be thrown.