They never were safe in C++. And no serious developer was expecting them to be perfectly safe, they are a tool for normal well-formed software to be a little le

They never were safe in C++. And no serious developer was expecting them to be perfectly safe, they are a tool for normal well-formed software to be a little less errer-prone. Everybody taking a class in C++ learns about const_cast and anyone clever eventually figures out how to use reinterpreter_cast for the similar things. Launder is a replacement for calling compiler intrinsics during certain special operations, not everyday use. For one example: If I wrote a simple benchmarking library and shipped its source code then an optimizer could easily mingle my benchmarking library into another developer's benchmarked code. Launder provides at least some rudimentary options for minimizing this so artifacts of the implementation of my benchmark impact the code being measured less and in more predictable ways. Other places this might be useful that I can think of off the top of my head might include: code that needs predictable binaries to avoid spectre and similar issues, working with precompiled binaries with headers but without source, code that is trying to leverage specific features of the underlying hardware possibly for maximum performance. I am sure there are more but disabling optimizations is super useful sometimes.