[raydev]

But that would compile and run, and you'd still get garbage if you tried to access str later, correct?

In Swift you are not allowed to declare a variable without assigning some value or nil to it before the current scope ends.

[benchaney]

I don't think that's true. The default constructor for std::string creates an empty string. See: https://www.cplusplus.com/reference/string/string/string/

The semantics of c++ object initialization are such that a constructor will always be called.

[jcelerier]

No, either you get the previous content of the string (if it was under the small-string optimization limit) or a new empty string, but never garbage.

[pjmlp]

In C++, you can prevent that with compiler options.