The comments here reflect that since this was written, both the C++ language and programming as a whole have moved forward a decent bit. For example, the existe

The comments here reflect that since this was written, both the C++ language and programming as a whole have moved forward a decent bit. For example, the existence of move has made the pattern of a private constructor a bit less cumbersome. That said, I think they still raise a good point: making a reliable foundational library in C++ is hard without the privelege of being able to make a lot of assumptions about the runtime environment and compiler flags. The exceptions in dtor thing is still true, so if you can't enforce -fno-exceptions, you're left in an awkward place. There are always more answers, but I think the fact that there's so many questions to begin with illustrates the problem.