Item 17. Writing Exception-Safe Code—Part 10

Difficulty: 9½

The end—at last. Thank you for considering this miniseries. I hope you've enjoyed it.

At this point, you're probably feeling a little drained and more than a little tired. That's understandable. So here's a final question as a parting gift—it's designed to make everyone remember the equally (if not more) tired people who had to figure this stuff out on their own from first principles and then scrambled hard to get reasonable exception-safety guarantees put into the standard library at the last minute. It's appropriate at this time to repeat public thanks to Dave Abrahams, Greg Colvin, Matt Austern, and all the other "exceptional" people who helped get the current safety guarantees into the standard library—and who managed to complete the job literally days before the standard was frozen in November 1997, at the ISO WG21 / ANSI J16 meeting at Morristown, N.J., USA.

Is the C++ standard library exception-safe?

Explain.