The full name of the rule is the rule of 3/5/0. It doesn’t say “Always provide all five”. It says that you have to either provide the three, the five, or none of them. Indeed, more often than not the smartest move is to not provide any of the five. But you can’t do that … Read more
I’d say the Rule of Three becomes the Rule of Three, Four and Five: Each class should explicitly define exactly one of the following set of special member functions: None Destructor, copy constructor, copy assignment operator In addition, each class that explicitly defines a destructor may explicitly define a move constructor and/or a move assignment … Read more
Introduction C++ treats variables of user-defined types with value semantics. This means that objects are implicitly copied in various contexts, and we should understand what “copying an object” actually means. Let us consider a simple example: class person { std::string name; int age; public: person(const std::string& name, int age) : name(name), age(age) { } }; … Read more