September 28, 2011
Copy constructors and "explicit" in C++

At one point you were probably told that something like:

int x;
x = 4;

could be simplified to:

int x = 4;

While it’s true that both of these result in x having the value of 4, they’re sort of different things. The = operator is a little different in each case.

You may also have been told at one point that int x = 4 could also be written as int x(4). In fact this is what’s really going on when we do the initialization-assignment. It’s just syntactic sugar for invoking the copy constructor. This is different from first allocating an object, and then assigning its contents.

If you don’t believe me, trying running this code:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

class Foo
{
  public:
    Foo() { cout << "ctor" << endl; }
    Foo(const Foo& f) { cout << "cctor" << endl; }
    Foo& operator=(const Foo& f) { cout << "op=" << endl; }
};

int main()
{
  cout << "Foo a;" << endl;
  Foo a;

  cout << "\nFoo b; b = a;" << endl;
  Foo b;
  b = a;

  cout << "\nFoo c(a);" << endl;
  Foo c(a);

  cout << "\nFoo d = a;" << endl;
  Foo d = a;

  return 0;
}

You’ll get this output:

Foo a;
ctor

Foo b; b = a;
ctor
op=

Foo c(a);
cctor

Foo d = a;
cctor

If you think about it this makes sense - initialization and assignment are two different things. Initialization is about figuring out what to make memory look like when an object first springs into existence. Assignment is about taking an already created object and replacing its current data with new data.

Now, consider an expression like this:

Foo f(v);
//or equivalently:
Foo f = v;

What type does v have in this context? In the code above v was a Foo, which made sense because we were invoking a copy constructor that expects a Foo as its only parameter. But it turns out that the type of v above doesn’t really matter – any v for which there is an appropriately defined Foo constructor will work:

Foo(int x) { cout << "Foo(int)" << endl; }

...

Foo e = 4;

The above is perfectly valid. The Foo e = 4 gets translated into Foo e(4), which is a valid way of constructing a Foo. It actually also turns out that Foo(int) works like any copy constructor would:

Foo do_stuff(Foo f)
{
  //stuff happens
  return 7;
}

...

Foo f = do_stuff(17);

The copy constructor is used to pass 17 as a Foo, and again to return 7 as a Foo.

This is actually kind of neat. Imagine if we were writing a BigInt class. It might look something like this:

class BigInt
{
  public:
    BigInt() { /*stuff*/ }
    BigInt(int x) { /*other stuff*/ }
    //some other public methods
  private:
    //magic instance data
};

We can now create BigInts from ints really simply, like this:

BigInt a = 42;

and also pass them to functions simply:

void stuff(BigInt x)
{
  //stuff
}

...

stuff(73);         // <- looks much nicer
stuff(BigInt(73)); // <- than this

That’s pretty convenient and allows for some nice syntax. But it can also be a bit of an issue. What if we were implementing some kind of container class:

template<class T>
class Container
{
  public:
    Container(int size) { /*stuff*/ }
    //etc
  private:
    //etc
};

We can do this to make a container with room for 4 things:

Container box(4);

But we can also do this:

Container box = 4;

That’s not so good. Unlike with BigInts, 4 is in no way a Container, and it’s misleading to use that kind of syntax. It can also get much more dangerous with things like this:

T add(Container<T> a, Container<t> b)
{
  //"add" the two containers
}

One might accidentally assume that add(box,5) is meant to add 5 to all the elements inside of box. Normally, the compiler would tell us that this is a type mis-match. But with the way we’ve defined our constructors, C++ will happily convert 5 into an empty container with room for 5 elements.

To fix this, we have the explicit keyword. Prefixing a constructor definition with explicit tells the compiler “don’t use this single-parameter constructor as a copy constructor”.

explicit Foo(int x) { cout << "Foo(int)" << endl; }

Now, trying to do something like Foo e = 4 will result in a compiler error.

September 28, 2011 Copy constructors and "explicit" in C++

September 28, 2011
Copy constructors and "explicit" in C++