In previous articles, I’ve waxed rhapsodic about how great C++ is. I also noted there however that every language, C++ included, has its dark sides. Some languages have an unavoidable pervasive dark side, like being slow or hard to multithread, for C++ that dark side is mostly its complexity. In this post I want to zoom in on a specific ‘gotcha’ that recently took me several hours to resolve. I wrote this piece so anyone running into the same issue might find out about it if they search the web.