Exception Safety Guarantees

This library assumes that T's destructor does not throw exceptions. If it does, the behaviour of many operations on optional<T> is undefined.

The following mutating operations never throw exceptions:

optional<T>::operator= ( none_t ) noexcept
optional<T>::reset() noexcept

In addition, the following constructors and the destructor never throw exceptions:

optional<T>::optional() noexcept
optional<T>::optional( none_t ) noexcept

Regarding the following assignment functions:

optional<T>::operator= ( optional<T> const& )
optional<T>::operator= ( T const& )
template<class U> optional<T>::operator= ( optional<U> const& )
template<class InPlaceFactory> optional<T>::operator= ( InPlaceFactory const& )
template<class TypedInPlaceFactory> optional<T>::operator= ( TypedInPlaceFactory const& )
optional<T>::reset( T const& )

They forward calls to the corresponding T's constructors or assignments (depending on whether the optional object is initialized or not); so if both T's constructor and the assignment provide strong exception safety guarantee, optional<T>'s assignment also provides strong exception safety guarantee; otherwise we only get the basic guarantee. Additionally, if both involved T's constructor and the assignment never throw, optional<T>'s assignment also never throws.

Unless T's constructor or assignment throws, assignments to optional<T> do not throw anything else on its own. A throw during assignment never changes the initialization state of any optional object involved:

optional<T> opt1(val1);
optional<T> opt2(val2);
assert(opt1);
assert(opt2);

try
{
  opt1 = opt2; // throws
}
catch(...)
{
  assert(opt1);
  assert(opt2);
}

This also applies to move assignments/constructors. However, move operations are made no-throw more often.

Operation emplace provides basic exception safety guarantee. If it throws, the optional object becomes uninitialized regardless of its initial state, and its previous contained value (if any) is destroyed. It doesn't call any assignment or move/copy constructor on T.

Swap

Unless swap on optional is customized, its primary implementation forwards calls to T's swap or move constructor (depending on the initialization state of the optional objects). Thus, if both T's swap and move constructor never throw, swap on optional<T> never throws. similarly, if both T's swap and move constructor offer strong guarantee, swap on optional<T> also offers a strong guarantee.

In case swap on optional is customized, the call to T's move constructor are replaced with the calls to T's default constructor followed by swap. (This is more useful on older compilers that do not support move semantics, when one wants to acheive stronger exception safety guarantees.) In this case the exception safety guarantees for swap are reliant on the guarantees of T's swap and default constructor

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Exception Safety Guarantees

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