classes

The lifecycle of each object starts with its creation; therefore, this post will be about the thirteen most fundamental rules for objects: constructor rules.

Does my class need a destructor? I often heard this question. Most of the times the answer is no and you are fine with the rule of zero. Sometimes the answer is yes and we are back to the rule of five. To be more precise. The guidelines provide eight rules for destructors.

This post is about the rule of zero, five, or maybe six. I will also show the difference between copy and reference semantic and a quite similar topic: deep versus shallow copy.

A class is a user-defined type where the programmer can specify the representation, the operations, and the interface. The C++ core guidelines have a lot of rules for user-defined types.