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I'm having a debate with a co-worker about throwing exceptions from constructors, and thought I would like some feedback. Is it OK to throw exceptions from constructors, from a design point of view? Lets say I'm wrapping a POSIX mutex in a class, it would look something like this: class Mutex { public: Mutex() { if (pthread_mutex_init(&mutex_, 0) != 0) { throw MutexInitException(); } } ~Mutex() { pthread_mutex_destroy(&mutex_); } void lock() { if (pthread_mutex_lock(&mutex_) != 0) { throw MutexLockException(); } } void unlock() { if (pthread_mutex_unlock(&mutex_) != 0) { throw MutexUnlockException(); } } private: pthread_mutex_t mutex_; }; My question is, is this the standard way to do it? Because if the pthread mutex_init call fails the mutex object is unusable so throwing an exception ensures that the mutex won't be created. Should I rather create a member function init for the Mutex class and call pthread mutex_init within which would return a bool based on pthread mutex_init 's return? This way I don't have to use exceptions for such a low level object.

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