Sometimes programming in C++ is wonderful when everything works and programs run blazingly fast, and then there are those painful moments when you encounter hard to diagnose runtime errors.
In this case, I was calling std::sort to sort a std::vector of Alignment objects.
I was using my own custom compare class to determine when one Alignment object should appear before the other.
The sort failed by throwing a std::bad_alloc exception, which is thrown when failing to allocate memory.
I was baffled for quite a while and had to step into the gdb debugger to get a very long backtrace with all of the gory details.
After quite some time, it boiled down to the fact that I had a bug in the Alignmentassignment operator: Alignment& operator=(const Alignment& a). This buggy assignment operator did not properly assign all of the attributes of the Alignment object - in particular it failed to properly assign the attribute being sorted on (oops!) - and this had the effect of violating the strict weak ordering which std::sort requires of the compare operator. This, in turn, somehow resulted in the std::bad_alloc exception.
It turns out I did not even need to provide a custom assignment operator - the default provided by the compiler would do.
For future reference, here's a Stack Overflow post where someone else encountered the same thing.
Like I said, C++ can be painful.
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