Google C++ style guide's No-exceptions rule; STL?

They say that they don't use exceptions, not that nobody should use them. If you look at the rationale they also write:

Because most existing C++ code at Google is not prepared to deal with exceptions, it is comparatively difficult to adopt new code that generates exceptions.

The usual legacy problem. :-(

We simply don't handle exceptions thrown by containers, at least in application-level code.

I've been an engineer at Google Search working in C++ since 2008. We do use STL containers often. I cannot personally recall a single major failure or bug that was ever traced back to something like vector::push_back() or map::operator[] failing, where we said "oh man, we have to rewrite this code because the allocation could fail" or "dang, if only we used exceptions, this could have been avoided." Does a process ever run out of memory? Yes, but this is usually a simple mistake (e.g., someone added a large new data file to the program and forgot to increase the RAM allocation) or a catastrophic failure where there's no good way to recover and proceed. Our system already manages and restarts jobs automatically to be robust to machines with faulty disks, cosmic rays, etc., and this is really no different.

So as far as I can tell, there is no problem here.

I'm pretty sure that they mean they do not use exceptions in their code. If you check out their cpplint script, it does check to ensure you are including the correct headers for STL containers (like vector, list, etc).

I have found that Google mentions this explicitly about STL and exceptions (emphasis is mine):

Although you should not use exceptions in your own code, they are used extensively in the ATL and some STLs, including the one that comes with Visual C++. When using the ATL, you should define _ATL_NO_EXCEPTIONS to disable exceptions. You should investigate whether you can also disable exceptions in your STL, but if not, it is OK to turn on exceptions in the compiler. (Note that this is only to get the STL to compile. You should still not write exception handling code yourself.)

I don't like such decisions (lucky that I am not working for Google), but they are quite clear about their behaviour and intentions.