On Thursday, December 21, 2023, Ville Voutilainen wrote:

>
> The implementation can do anything, including throwing an exception.
>


Okay I understand now. The implementation will only violate the Standard
after you as the programmer have warranted it to do so by invoking
undefined behaviour (and therefore it's not really violating the Standard
because it can do whatever it likes).

To be doubly sure and deliberately paranoid, when writing portable code to
run on everything from an 8-Bit single-core microcontroller to a multi-core
64-Bit supercomputer, maybe wrap 'std::align' in a wrapper that catches and
calls terminate. (I mean just to cover yourself sort of like casting to an
'unsigned char' before invoking 'std::tolower').

Personally when I'm writing bullet-proof code, I just put many 'assert's
throughout the code. I would assert that a vector is non-empty before
calling 'front()'. If I want to handle bad input from the user or corrupt
data from a socket, I throw an exception. I don't see myself ever waiting
for UB to be invoked and then relying on a particular implementation's
flamboyant use of its warrant to do whatever it wants. The whole Lakos
thing isn't my cup of tea, but hey it seems a lot of intelligent people
like it.

When I want to torture test a program of mine, I use a cross-compiler to
build it for 32-Bit Big Endian ARM, and then I run it in the Qemu CPU
emulator on my 64-Bit Little Endian x86 desktop PC. If the emulator runs
the program perfectly then I'm probably onto a winner.

One day I'd love to write a very bizarre CPU emulator and compiler that
does all sorts of weirdness:

    sizeof(char*) > sizeof(int*)
    negative numbers == One's Complement
    CHAR_BIT == 11
    integer types contain padding bits
    null pointer is all bits 1

I'd use this setup to torture-test programs.