This is an unofficial snapshot of the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG21 Core Issues List revision 115d. See http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/ for the official list.

2024-10-26


2765. Address comparisons between potentially non-unique objects during constant evaluation

Section: 6.7.2  [intro.object]     Status: open     Submitter: CWG     Date: 2023-07-14

The (arguably) expanded treatment of backing arrays and string literals as potentially non-unique objects in issue 2753 lead to the question how the resulting address comparisons are treated during constant evaluation.

Subclause 7.7 [expr.const] bullet 5.24 specifies:

An expression E is a core constant expression unless the evaluation of E, following the rules of the abstract machine (6.9.1 [intro.execution]), would evaluate one of the following:

This phrasing is understood to refer to explicitly unspecified outcomes only. The treatment of an example such as

  constexpr bool b = "abc" == "abc";

is unclear, given that identical string literals may or may not yield distinct string literal objects.

The assumption that equality comparison of std::string_view would compare addresses as a short-cut before comparing the character sequence could not be confirmed (23.2.2 [char.traits.require], 23.3.3.8 [string.view.ops] paragraph 12).

CWG in Tokyo 2024-03-22

Different approaches are feasible:

In the latter cases, tag values can be preserved when performing pointer arithmetic.