Re: [boost] [outcome] Exception safety guarantees

Subject: Re: [boost] [outcome] Exception safety guarantees
From: Howard Hinnant (howard.hinnant_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-05-29 04:15:45

On May 28, 2017, at 6:36 PM, Andrzej Krzemienski via Boost <boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> 
> 2017-05-28 2:10 GMT+02:00 Peter Dimov via Boost <boost_at_[hidden]>:
> 
>> 
>> (It's the same for move, by the way. There are people who prefer
>> destroy-only for moved-from objects. The standard library does not agree
>> with them, this time because Howard.)
>> 
> 
> Acknowledged. But what do the STL containers/algorithms do with the
> moved-from objects other than to destroy them or reset them?

They are allowed to do everything with moved-from objects that they are allowed to do with objects that haven’t been moved from.  For example sort is allowed to move construct from, move assign to, move assign from, swap, and compare objects, whether or not they are in a  moved from state.  std::sort requires objects to satisfy strict weak ordering.  This means among other things that x < x is always false, even if x is in a moved-from state.

In summary, being in a moved-from state does not excuse an object from meeting the requirements of the algorithm it is being used with.  It only excuses the object from having a specified state (in most cases).

Real-world examples:

An old std::reverse implementation, when given a range with an odd length, would swap the middle element with itself.  This results in a moved-from object being self-move-assigned if the generic std::swap is being used.  It just has to work.  By work, I mean that the self-move-assignment of a moved-from-object has to leave the object in a valid but unspecified state.  If it does this, then self-swap is a non-modifying operation, and the reverse algorithm gives the correct result.

The std::remove algorithm returns moved-from objects back to the client (those at the end of the sequence that have been “removed”).  The client is free to do anything he wants with those objects as long as that operation does not have a precondition.  Although the typical use case is for the client to delete those “removed” elements, that is by no means required, or the only use case.

I know of no sort implementation that compares moved-from objects (though I have not done a rigorous survey either).  But it is quite possible that a sort algorithm could compare a moved-from object against itself, and still be a correct algorithm, as long as x < x (or comp(x, x)) _always_ returns false.

Howard