Re: another question about exception safety

From:
acehreli@gmail.com
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Tue, 25 Mar 2008 02:13:05 CST
Message-ID:
<02fbfed8-28e8-484f-9e4e-42600d01039c@s37g2000prg.googlegroups.com>
On Mar 23, 10:23 pm, Mathias Gaunard <loufo...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mar 24, 2:13 am, Mortiz <ydruga...@gmail.com> wrote:

Suppose some class has only two members: std::map<std::string,
std::string> member1 and std::string member2. Also it has ctor which
takes std::string and assigns it member2. In order to provide
exception-safe assignment operator for such class do I have to provide
non-throw swap method and use it inside assignment operator? How
should copy ctor look like


You can use the default copy constructor and assignment operator, they
will both be exception-safe.


Unfortunately no, the default assignment is not exception safe. The
default assigment assigns members and bases recursively. It doesn't
know how to revert if one of those operations throws. As a result, we
have a half-assigned object at hand.

There is no problem in the case of the default copy constructor,
because the object never ends up being half-constructed. (If any of
the member resources require explicit release, e.g. with delete, than
that's a separate issue that needs to be taken care of using RAII.)

We hear "the rule of the three", but we don't talk about "the rule of
the one" much. :) Regardless of the other two, the assigment operator
must be provided if we want strongly exception-safe assigment.

Ali

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