Registration is now open for CppCon 2023! The conference starts on October 1 and will be held in person in Aurora, CO. To whet your appetite for this year’s conference, we’re posting some upcoming talks that you will be able to attend this year. Here’s another CppCon future talk we hope you will enjoy – and register today for CppCon 2023!

Noexcept? Enabling Testing of Contract Checks

Wednesday, October 4 • 09:00 - 10:00

by Pablo Halpern and Timur Doumler

Summary of the talk:

Should `noexcept` be part of your function's contract? A function's *contract* is the set of pre-conditions promised by the the caller and the set of post-conditions promised by the function itself, including whether or not it throws an exception. Naively, then, it would seem that `noexcept` is a good way to indicate that your function does not throw when called in contract, but things are not so simple. In this talk, we'll review the original purpose of the `noexcept` specifier and the `noexcept` operator. We'll look at how runtime contract checks can be tested and how `noexcept` interferes with such testing. Along the way, we'll touch on the proposed contract-checking feature in C++26, eventually arriving at an alternative exception-specification annotation that would mesh far better with contract checking than `noexcept` currently does.