If you’re writing a kernel, you’ll almost certainly be using “-nostdlib” (or your compiler’s equivalent) so unique_ptr, etc. won’t be there. You could however write your own unique_ptr that allocates via whatever allocator you write for your kernel. See [1] for a decent overview of what using C++ in a kernel entails.

[1]: http://wiki.osdev.org/C%2B%2B

> If you’re writing a kernel, you’ll almost certainly be using “-nostdlib” (or your compiler’s equivalent) so unique_ptr, etc. won’t be there.

Huh? unique_ptr has a customizable Deleter though; you should be able to provide a custom one so it doesn't call delete.

And doesn't a kernel implement a kmalloc() or something anyway? You would just write your own operator new and have it do what your kernel needs, and the rest of the standard library would just work with it.

True, but the "rest of the standard library" is somewhat harder to port and last time I played with it (admittedly some years ago) no compilers were good at letting you pick and choose.

> All the code that you need in order to support smart pointers, templates, move/copy semantics, exceptions and so on.

smart pointers are their own classes, and exceptions would certainly be disabled in kernel-mode, sure, but for the rest ? which additional code ? there's no magic behind templates and move semantics, and no run-time impact. It's purely a compile-time feature.

> and hope that the hardware learns about unique_ptr by osmosis

Unique_ptr is just a template and does not need the standard library. Also move/ownership semantics don't need unique_ptr.

> The last C++ codebase I was working on had at least a dozen workarounds, for at least half a dozen bugs in the compiler.

There are at least four compilers that been extensively production tested - ICC, GCC, MSVC and Clang. Which one had these bugs and was it kept up to date?