However, I (Bjarne Stroustrup) have had many requests for more information about the standard library. Consequently, I have written a longish (34 page) tutorial description what the standard library guarantees about exception safety, how it delivers those guarantees, and what the user needs to do to benefit. This description has the form of an appendix to my 3rd edition and is intented to be sufficiently complete to guide programmers to do nontrivial work using exceptions and the standard library. It is now "Appendix E" of The C++ Programming Language (special Edition) and will appear in some future printing of "The C++ Programming Language (3rd Edition)". For readers of my 3rd edition, I post it to the web: Appendix E: Standard Library Exception Safety. I wellcome reports on errors and suggestions for improvements. On the other hand, the material is new, so I offer only a $1 bounty for errors found in the standard-library exception safety appendix.
Thanks to people who have sent me comments that helped improve the presentation, including: Dave Abrahams, Matt Austern, Walter Brown, Mogens Hansen, John D. Hickin, Andrew Koenig, George Reilly, and Paul Whitehead.
Please note that this appendix is provided as a help to people who have read a fair bit of the rest of my book. It is not aimed at novices.
- Bjarne