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Saturday 3 August 2019

std::is_constant_evaluated: make debugging a little bit harder for yourself!

Let's pretend you find this:

const int a = foo();
int b = foo();

Would you be tempted to assume that a==b, always? I would. What if 'foo' actually depends on a global variable, and its return value depends on that global setting? Suddenly the code above will raise a few eyebrows in a code review session.

Coming to your friendly c++20 standard now:

constexpr int foo() { 
    return (std::is_constant_evaluated())? 42 : 24;
}

bool a() {
    const int x = foo();
    return x == foo();
}

I'm sure with careful usage, is_constant_evaluated will allow library writers to create much more performant code. I'm also sure I'll lose a lot of hair trying to figure out why my debug code (cout << foo(), anyone?) prints different values than my `production` code.

2 comments:

  1. From what I can glean from the standard, there's no debug/release mode difference here. In either case, the compiler is required to constant-evaluate foo() when initialising x. From reading P0595R2 it seems like they tightened up the semantics somewhat to make sure that this was the case.

    To test the theory, a program compiled with Clang produces the same result in both -O0 and -O3 modes: https://godbolt.org/z/BpG2Ob

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  2. Thanks aiusepsi! I think that somewhat misses the point of the article though: I'm not saying -O levels will provide different behavior, I'm worried that code I use to debug, such as "cout << foo()" will have different behavior to "const int x = foo()". If there ever is a bug that causes foo to behave differently due to is_const_eval, I'll take hours to find it out.

    The wording in the article might be a bit poor, I think... Probably a good idea if I clarify the last sentence of the article to reflect this!

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