> It doesn't Yes it does. Of course you can detect different evaluation orders using side effects, but the fact that evaluation order is unspecified isn't gene

> It doesn't Yes it does. Of course you can detect different evaluation orders using side effects, but the fact that evaluation order is unspecified isn't generally a problem: if you write code like `a() + b()` and a() and b() has side-effects that depend on the order they're evaluated in, that is just a bad way of writing code. In any language. The point here is that the compiler is allowed to interleave subexpressions of the two different arguments which causes a memory leak in seemingly safe code. That is a very unreasonable thing for the compiler to do, which is why it is a footgun. But not that it can ONLY happen if the second function throws in between the construction of the object with "new" and the construction of the shared_ptr: if the second function doesn't throw an exception, the construction of shared_ptr is guaranteed to happen. Incidentally: those "exercise for the reader" comments are incredibly obnoxious.