> Why is it this way? As best as I can find it's so that destructors always run in reverse order of construction, I guess there could be some edge cases there that matter. It's not the strongest argument, but it's not nothing.
I have seen my share of teardown races that were fixed by reordering data members. There's nothing quite like having a mutex torn down before the object that it's guarding.
Running destructors in reverse order of construction is really the only thing that makes sense in an RAII world. It's the same argument as running the destructors in reverse order of construction when exiting a scope.
That's still not a great reason for designated initializers being restricted in the same way they were in C90, especially given the advantage of hindsight. It makes a ton of sense if you have explicit dependencies between data members created during construction, but I can't see a way that you can create those dependencies with designated initializers.
I have seen my share of teardown races that were fixed by reordering data members. There's nothing quite like having a mutex torn down before the object that it's guarding.
Running destructors in reverse order of construction is really the only thing that makes sense in an RAII world. It's the same argument as running the destructors in reverse order of construction when exiting a scope.
That's still not a great reason for designated initializers being restricted in the same way they were in C90, especially given the advantage of hindsight. It makes a ton of sense if you have explicit dependencies between data members created during construction, but I can't see a way that you can create those dependencies with designated initializers.