So today I wrote a fairly hard to find bug where I initialized a std::string to nullptr (not a pointer to std::string, but the value itself). I've found apparently it's only possible to do in C++11 or later with clang.
#include <string>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
class Meh{
int x;
};
class Foo
{
private:
std::string x=nullptr;
Meh y=nullptr; //remove this line and it compiles
public:
std::string z=nullptr;
};
int main(void)
{
Foo f;
cout << f.z;
return 0;
}
As you can see, I tried assigning nullptr to just a random instance of a class and it didn't work. What magic is in string that allows this to work, and in what way is this even valid syntax? I assumed I would be met with a type casting error in this case.
For reference I compiled with this:
clang++ test.cpp -O3 -g -fno-inline -std=c++11 -Wall
It gave no form of warnings, though it would error out if not using C++11
That's simply because there are constructors (number (5) in the link) and assignment operators (number (3) in the link) for std::string that accept a const char*, and hence the nullptr matches.
Before C++11 (and therefore before nullptr), the same problem occurred when you tried to construct from 0 or NULL. All those cases were illegal and result in undefined behaviour, although at least one STL (RogueWave?) accepted it in the past and generated an empty string.