" Thread-safety should not be a run-time configurable property." I think this is somewhat incorrect as absolutes usually are.
Well, I'll probably lose the fairly abstract discussion of general incorrectness of absolutes. :-) I just think that compile-time vs. run-time is a pragmatic choice. Why give the user an alternative with is dubious and likely incorrect? For that reason std::list does not provide operator[] even though it could. Surely, one could come up with his/her design that would "require" such an operator for std::list. Does it invalidate the decisions STL designers made? I do not think so. That is why I am suspicious of temptations to lump distinctly different functions of scoped_lock, try_lock and timed_lock into one universal blob. V.