Exceptional C++: 47 Engineering Puzzles, Programming Problems, and Solutions

Part . Exception-Safety Issues and Techniques

First, a little of the history of this topic is in order. In 1994, Tom Cargill published the seminal article “Exception Handling: A False Sense of Security” (Cargill94).^[1] It demonstrated conclusively that, at that time, the C++ community did not yet fully understand how to write exception-safe code. In fact, we didn't even know what all the important exception-safety issues were, or how to correctly reason about exception safety. Cargill challenged anyone to demonstrate a conclusive solution to this problem. Three years passed. A few people wrote partial responses to aspects of Cargill's example, but no one showed a comprehensive solution.

Then, in 1997, Guru of the Week #8 appeared on the Internet ...