I was told that the reason why non-transient allocations failed to make it into C++20 is the "vector<unique_ptr<int>> problem" - i.e., if you have

    constexpr std::vector<std::unique_ptr<int>> V = ...;

then the language doesn't have a mechanism to stop you from modifying the values that the elements of V point to. Later I was told that Daveed thinks he knows how to solve this problem by introducing some sort of transitive constness into the language, though of course something like this will have to wait for C++23 or later.

Can someone flesh out this picture for me a bit more? Why is the problem a problem that needs to be solved in the first place? i.e., what breaks in the language if we just say: yes, you can modify *V[i]? Indeed, P0784R5 seems to recognize that having constexpr allocations be mutable can be useful, as long as the destructor doesn't read any values that have been modified. If that's the case, why is transitive constness needed?

Thanks
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Brian Bi