Re:My favourite C++ footgun
by OskarS on Wednesday June 23, 2021 @09:25AM
(#27604286)
> It doesn't
Yes it does. Of course you can detect different evaluation orders using side effects, but the fact that evaluation order is unspecified isn't generally a problem: if you write code like `a() + b()` and a() and b() has side-effects that depend on the order they're evaluated in, that is just a bad way of writing code. In any language.
The point here is that the compiler is allowed to interleave subexpressions of the two different arguments which causes a memory leak in seemingly safe code. That is a very unreasonable thing for the compiler to do, which is why it is a footgun. But not that it can ONLY happen if the second function throws in between the construction of the object with "new" and the construction of the shared_ptr: if the second function doesn't throw an exception, the construction of shared_ptr is guaranteed to happen.
Incidentally: those "exercise for the reader" comments are incredibly obnoxious.
Yes it does. Of course you can detect different evaluation orders using side effects, but the fact that evaluation order is unspecified isn't generally a problem: if you write code like `a() + b()` and a() and b() has side-effects that depend on the order they're evaluated in, that is just a bad way of writing code. In any language.
The point here is that the compiler is allowed to interleave subexpressions of the two different arguments which causes a memory leak in seemingly safe code. That is a very unreasonable thing for the compiler to do, which is why it is a footgun. But not that it can ONLY happen if the second function throws in between the construction of the object with "new" and the construction of the shared_ptr: if the second function doesn't throw an exception, the construction of shared_ptr is guaranteed to happen.
Incidentally: those "exercise for the reader" comments are incredibly obnoxious.