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by ncmncm 2632 days ago
You might have picked the wrong hill to die on.

C++ destructors really are deterministic, even in the face of exceptions, lambdas, and moves: everything constructed gets destroyed. Modern wrinkles where the compiler is allowed to skip a construction and a destruction do not contradict that. You have to fool with heap memory or evoke UB to escape that law.

1 comments

To be useful, determinism has to mean not only that something happens but that it happens at a predictable time. Otherwise you're into that tautological "everything is deterministic" territory, and you step into that even deeper when you acknowledge the "modern wrinkles". "Compiler is allowed" (but not required) is practically the definition of non-determinism.
"Compiler is allowed" not to destroy what it never constructed.

This is no different from the myriad other elisions modern compilers do -- and that CPU cores do.

Deterministically, destructors run exactly when the constructed object goes out of scope, after objects constructed later, before those constructed earlier. More determinism than that is something you will get from nobody.

You don't have to write any constructors at all. Write ordinary functions, and call them whenever you like. Been there, had enough of that for several lifetimes. Destructors are better.