GCC bug in noexcept operator

When something goes wrong, the first thing is to ask myself what did I do wrong. I don’t like just throwing the blame. And when I saw the not declared in this scope error related to the noexcept operator,  I was sure I was missing something. Maybe I had accidentally used a compiler extension, maybe I used something that’s undefined behavior. But I didn’t think it could be a GCC noexcept compiler bug.

I have a container that encapsulates a vector, for which I wanted to have a noexcept swap method. Ignore the implementation itself, the idea is I wanted to declare the method noexcept if the swap operations on the items I wanted to swap are also noexcept. It can be any other case that implies noexcept.

#include <vector>
#include <utility>
#include <cassert>

struct Container {
    std::vector<int> elements{};
    std::size_t count{};

    void swap(Container &c) noexcept(noexcept(elements.swap(c.elements)) && noexcept(std::swap(count, c.count))) {
        elements.swap(c.elements);
        std::swap(count, c.count);
    }
};

int main() {
    Container a{{1, 2}, 2};
    Container b{{3, 4, 5}, 3};

    a.swap(b);

    assert(a.elements == (std::vector<int>{3, 4, 5}));
    assert(a.count == 3);

    assert(b.elements == (std::vector<int>{1, 2}));
    assert(b.count == 2);
}

 

This tells that Container’s swap is noexcept if both swaps of elements and count are noexcept:

void swap(Container &c) noexcept(noexcept(elements.swap(c.elements)) && noexcept(std::swap(count, c.count)));

 

MSVC and Clang compile this, but GCC needs a newer version because on older ones it has the bug [DR 1207] “this” not being allowed in noexcept clauses, which I’ve found in this discussion.

If you see one of the following errors, try to update your compiler:

• • ‘elements’ was not declared in this scope
  • invalid use of incomplete type ‘struct Container’
  • invalid use of ‘this’ at top level