[TillE]

Basically the behavior is hardware-dependent, and nobody wants to mandate that C++ compilers generate a ton of extra instructions on hardware which does not behave a particular way.

Of course you can define your own checked integer types, using inline assembly to check the overflow flag where available.

[simonask]

Just so we're clear, yes, it's "hardware-dependent", but literally every single architecture and CPU model does the same reasonable thing, which is to wrap into the negative.

Any architecture that doesn't use 2s complement is so esoteric by now that it does not make any sense for a general-purpose C compiler to pretend they exist.