Re: std::vector and a bit-wise copy

From:
red floyd <redfloyd@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Wed, 9 Feb 2011 20:45:43 CST
Message-ID:
<4e88a30b-7f73-450c-95ba-400e0488e9d8@q2g2000pre.googlegroups.com>
On Feb 9, 3:24 pm, Jeremy <bjerem...@yahoo.com> wrote:

I have a question that I having trouble finding a straight answer to,
but thought it may be obvious to someone here.

If I have a struct with a vector as a member:

struct A
{
    std::vector<int> theVec;

};

And I make two instances of that vector x and y and populate the
vector in x. Is it undefined behavior to then set y= x ? Such as

int main()
{
    A x;
    A y;

    fill(x); // allocates the vector and populates it

    y = x;

}

Seeing A has no copy-constructor declared, we should do a bit-wise
copy from x to y. Since the vector in y has no memory allocated to it,
I'm assuming this should be just a case of memory trampling and
exhibit UB.

Is that wrong or am I missing something w.r.t. the bit-wise copy?


You're wrong because you're missing something wrt the copy.

Per 12.8/13 ([class.copy]):

"The implicitly-defined copy assignment operator for class X performs
memberwise assignemnt of its subobjects."

So it's not a bitwise copy of the vector member, instead
vector<T>::operator=()
is called to copy x.theVec to y.theVec

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