When is it right for a constructor to throw an exception?

Question

When is it right for a constructor to throw an exception? (Or in the case of Objective C: when is it right for an init\'er to return nil?)

It seems to me that a cons

Answer 1

Throwing an exception during construction is a great way to make your code way more complex. Things that would seem simple suddenly become hard. For example, let's say you have a stack. How do you pop the stack and return the top value? Well, if the objects in the stack can throw in their constructors (constructing the temporary to return to the caller), you can't guarantee that you won't lose data (decrement stack pointer, construct return value using copy constructor of value in stack, which throws, and now have a stack that just lost an item)! This is why std::stack::pop does not return a value, and you have to call std::stack::top.

This problem is well described here, check Item 10, writing exception-safe code.