Construction, Destruction, and Copying - C++.Coding.Standards.1918.Rules.Guidelines [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Construction, Destruction, and Copying

Just because the standard provides a cliff in front of you, you are not necessarily required to jump off it.

Norman Diamond

There is enough to be said about the Big Four special member functions that you will probably be unsurprised to see that they rate having their own section. Herein we collect knowledge and best practices related to default construction, copy construction, copy assignment, and destruction.

One of the reasons you need to be careful with these functions is that, given half a chance, the compiler will write them for you. Another reason is that C++ by default treats classes as value-like types, but not all types are value-like (see Item 32). Know when to write (or disable) these special member functions explicitly, and follow the rules and guidelines in this section to help ensure that you get correct, extensible, and error-safe code.

Our vote for the most valuable Item in this section goes to Item 51: Destructors, deallocation, and

swap never fail.