[quotemstr]

In far more cases, zero-cost abstractions make obvious or impossible bugs that would be hard to spot in C programs, e.g. memory lifetime rule violations. And you could make a similar argument that C obscures bugs that would be obvious in assembly. High level languages are a blessing, and programmers who avoid them are only decreasing their productivity and those around them.

The problem the article highlights appears to be an implementation defect: in my libstdc++ test just now, we do, in fact, mark the list as nothrow move constructible. The standard should mandate that std::list be infallibly moveable.

Are we going to indict a whole programming model based on an isolated implementation bug? If so, well, isn't doing that from a "C is better" perspective the galactic black hole calling the kettle black?

    #include <cstdio>
    #include <list>
    #include <type_traits>
    #include <vector>

    struct Node;

    struct Connection {
        Node *from, *to;
    };

    struct Node {
        std::vector<Connection> connections;
    };

    int
    main()
    {
        printf("%d\n", std::is_nothrow_move_constructible_v<std::list<Node>>);
        return 0;
    }

[camblomquist]

I mentioned it in a side note that I trimmed because there were so many that it spilled into the footer (faster to trim the article than to fix the CSS,) but Microsoft is the only implementation of the big three that doesn't mark the move constructor here as nothrow. The standard doesn't require it so it's valid for MSVC to do things the way they do, it just creates problems like this that would arguably be harder to find the cause of if one had to build code for multiple platforms.

[quotemstr]

Right. My point is that 1) this is a quality-of-implementation issue in MSVC, 2) the standard should be phrased such that the MSVC implementation is illegal, and 3) the C++ standard library solves a lot more problems than it creates despite having warts like this and C++ having some unfortunate defaults (e.g. mutability by default).