Sutter's ISO C++ Trip Report - The best compliment is when someone else steals your ideas....

[John Carter]

https://herbsutter.com/2018/07/02/trip-report-summer-iso-c-standards-meeting-rapperswil/

This looks to me like a huge step forward for C++....

> * You get to install your own violation handler and ship a 
> release build with the option of turning on enforcement at run 
> time.
> * You get to express audit to distinguish expensive checks to 
> be run only when explicitly requested.
> * You get to express axiom contracts that are intended to never 
> generate run-time code but are available to static analysis 
> tools.
> * Finally, you will likely get better performance, because 
> contracts should enable compilers to perform more 
> optimizations, more easily, than expressing them using 
> assertions.

The last to look very important to me.

I have been looking closely at what the compiler (and splint) 
does with asserts in our code 
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50165291/how-can-one-implement-assert-to-make-use-of-gccs-optimizers-static-dataflo

And found that counter intuitively (in C at least), asserts 
weakened gcc's static analysis abilities!

> Step 2 is to (gradually) migrate std:: standard library 
> precondition violations in particular from exceptions (or error 
> codes) to contracts. The programming world now broadly 
> recognizes that programming bugs (e.g., out-of-bounds access, 
> null dereference, and in general all pre/post/assert-condition 
> violations) cause a corrupted state that cannot be recovered 
> from programmatically, and so they should never be reported to 
> the calling code as exceptions or error codes that code could 
> somehow handle.

Ah, that's a really nice statement.