neither VS Better Enums

I say that because exception cater for the common case of error handling, which is that the caller of a function that failed stops further processing. It cleans up and bails out. Therefore, any approach which has to inspect the error upon a function return is more complex, however palatable it can be made through C++ niceties.

Isn't TFA looking for this?

I really like better_enums instead of magic_enums. There’s no limit on enum size with it: http://aantron.github.io/better-enums/

It was heavily used at a former employer of mine, so definitely a solid production-ready solution.

IIRC I then switched to another library doing the same stuff: https://github.com/aantron/better-enums It is not as magical, as it uses a special macro to define the enum, using dedicated syntax. So it only works for enums you yourself define. However, it did work a lot better for me with enums with huge values.

I can't keep up! First we have better enum, then some guy at a conference says we have to use wise enum instead, and now you speak of magic enum!

If you need a laugh today, look at Better Enums library for C++. If you thought moving from C to C++ would let you leave macros behind, think again! Enums in C++ still suck (a bit less than in C though), so someone built a library to help with that. And it's built on macros. So you can only have 64 entries per enum. And the library's code is barely readable.