Detecting incorrect C++ STL usage

The GCC and LLVM sanitizers are great for finding problems in C++ code, but they do not detect problems with incorrect STL usage. For example, std::list::merge merges two sorted lists, so the following program is incorrect (as list2 is not sorted)

#include <iostream>
#include <list>

int main()
{
  std::list<int> list1 = {1, 2, 3, 4};
  std::list<int> list2 = {5, 3, 4, 2};
  list1.merge(list2);
  for (auto x : list1)
    std::cout << x << '\n';
}

but this cannot be detected by the sanitizers. The libstdc++ library does, however, have a “debug mode” that can be used to detect this kind of problems. The debug mode is enabled by passing -D_GLIBCXX_DEBUG to the compiler

g++ -O2 -D_GLIBCXX_DEBUG example.cpp

which enables assertions checking the preconditions, and the program fails at runtime

/scratch/gcc-7.2.0/install/include/c++/7.2.0/debug/list:716:
Error: elements in iterator range [__x.begin().base(), __x.end().base())
are not sorted.

Objects involved in the operation:
    iterator "__x.begin().base()" @ 0x0x7fff1754ea10 {
      type = std::__cxx1998::_List_iterator;
    }
    iterator "__x.end().base()" @ 0x0x7fff1754ea40 {
      type = std::__cxx1998::_List_iterator;
    }
Abort (core dumped)

There are a few constructs that are invalid according to the C++ standard but that libstdc++ handles as an extension. One such example is inserting a range of a list into the list the range points to, as in

#include <iostream>
#include <list>

int main()
{
  std::list<int> list1 = {1, 2, 3, 4};
  list1.insert(list1.begin(), list1.begin(), list1.end());
  for (auto x : list1)
    std::cout << x << '\n';
}

The debug mode does not report errors for these extensions when using -D_GLIBCXX_DEBUG, but the debug mode can be made more pedantic by adding -D_GLIBCXX_DEBUG_PEDANTIC

g++ -O2 -D_GLIBCXX_DEBUG -D_GLIBCXX_DEBUG_PEDANTIC example.cpp

which reports errors for these too.

One annoyance with the debug mode is that it changes the size of some standard class templates, so you cannot pass containers between translation units compiled with and without debug mode – this often means that you need to build the whole application with debug mode enabled.

The libstdc++ debug mode was introduced in GCC 3.4.