Anthony Williams wrote: [...]
N2420 (http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n2420.pdf) covers some of the relevant ground --- it's the minutes of the POSIX/C++ liaison committee.
"Gnu gcc and Solaris pthreads: The Gnu gcc and Solaris pthreads implementations are two known implementations that attempt to map POSIX pthread cancellation onto C++ exception handling, but both do so at the cost of breaking the exception model (i.e., they no longer conform to ISO C++) because the alternative appears to be that C++ destructors and catch blocks would not be invoked for cancellation which would mean that resources would be leaked." Uhmm. Don't know about (modern) Solaris, but glibc (presumably that is meant by "Gnu gcc pthreads implementation") does invoke C++ destructors and catch blocks. But instead of using ordinary exceptions, it uses "forced unwinding" for thread cancel and exit. For some unknown reason (other than "I say it must be so"), glibc maintainer Drepper of Red Hat simply refuses to even contemplate changing it to use ordinary exceptions instead of "forced unwinding"... and I suspect that is the reason why WG21 was asked to drop standardization of thread cancel (and exit) as exceptions. regards, alexander.