rogrammers have little control over the implicit declarations of the
four canonical member functions. The compiler will not generate a default constructor for a class that has a user-declared copy-constructor. This frustrating state of affairs is about to change. The
deleted and defaulted functions proposal provides a convenient mechanism for just this type of per-class customization. The following sections will show you how to use defaulted functions.
In certain cases, you need to define a default constructor manually, because the compiler will not implicitly-declare it. Not only is manual constructor definition tedious, it's also not very efficient.
Use the new =default function specifier to make the compiler generate a member function that wouldn't be generated otherwise.
Presenting the Problem
Suppose you're designing a class that requires a user-defined copy constructor:
class C
{
public:
C(const C& rhs);
};
Later, when you try to create an object for this class, you get a compilation error:
C obj;//error: no default constructor exists for class C
C * pc= new C; //same error
This kind of error can baffle even experienced programmers. Wasn't the compiler supposed to
implicitly declare a default constructor for class
C? No, it wasn't. When you declare a copy constructor in a class, the compiler doesn't implicitly-declare a default constructor in that class. What if you want the compiler to generate a default constructor for you anyway? In C++03, there's no way to override these language rules; you simply have to define the missing default constructor manually:
class C
{
public:
C(const C& rhs);
C() {} //manual definition of a default constructor
};
C obj; //OK
Not only is this tedious, the user-defined default constructor is often less efficient than the compiler's
implicitly-defined default constructor.
