What does it mean to "poison a function" in C++?

Question

At the very end of Scott Schurr's talk "Introducing constexpr" at CppCon, he asks "Is there a way to poison a function"? He then explains that this can be done (albeit in a non-standard way) by:

1. Putting a throw in a constexpr function
2. Declaring an unresolved extern const char*
3. Referencing the unresolved extern in the throw

I sense that I'm a bit out of my depth here, but I'm curious:

• What does it mean to "poison a function"?
• What is the significance/usefulness of the technique he outlines?

Answer 1

In general it refers to making a function unusable, e.g. if you want to ban the use of dynamic allocation in a program you could "poison" the malloc function so it can't be used.

In the video he's using it in a more specific way, which is clear if you read the slide that is displayed when he talks about poisoning the function, which says "A way to force compile-time only?"

So he is talking about "poisoning" the function to make it uncallable at run-time, so it's only callable in constant expressions. The technique is to have a branch in the function which is never taken when called in a compile-time context, and to make that branch contain something that will cause an error.

A throw expression is allowed in a constexpr function, as long as it is never reached during compile-time invocations of the function (because you can't throw an exception at compile-time, it's an inherently dynamic operation, like allocating memory). So a throw expression that refers to an undefined symbol will not be used during compile-time invocations (because that would fail to compile) and cannot be used at run-time, because the undefined symbol causes a linker error.

Because the undefined symbol is not "odr-used" in the compile-time invocations of the function, in practice the compiler will not create a reference to the symbol, so it's OK that it's undefined.

Is that useful? He's demonstrating how to do it, not necessarily saying it's a good idea or widely useful. If you have a need to do it for some reason then his technique might solve your problem. If you don't have a need for it, you don't need to worry about it.

One reason it might be useful is when the compile-time version of some operation is not as efficient as it could be. There are restrictions on the kind of expressions allowed in a constexpr function (especially in C++11, some restrictions were removed in C++14). So you might have two versions of a function for performing a calculation, one that is optimal, but uses expressions that aren't allowed in a constexpr function, and one that is a valid constexpr function, but would perform poorly if called at run-time. You could poison the sub-optimal one to ensure it is never used for run-time calls, ensuring the more efficient (non-constexpr) version is used for run-time calls.

N.B. The performance of a constexpr function used at compile-time is not really important, because it has no run-time overhead anyway. It might slow down your compilation by making the compiler do extra work, but it won't have any run-time performance cost.