Copy constructor and = operator overload in C++: is a common function possible?

Solution 1:

Yes. There are two common options. One - which is generally discouraged - is to call the operator= from the copy constructor explicitly:

MyClass(const MyClass& other)
{
    operator=(other);
}

However, providing a good operator= is a challenge when it comes to dealing with the old state and issues arising from self assignment. Also, all members and bases get default initialized first even if they are to be assigned to from other. This may not even be valid for all members and bases and even where it is valid it is semantically redundant and may be practically expensive.

An increasingly popular solution is to implement operator= using the copy constructor and a swap method.

MyClass& operator=(const MyClass& other)
{
    MyClass tmp(other);
    swap(tmp);
    return *this;
}

or even:

MyClass& operator=(MyClass other)
{
    swap(other);
    return *this;
}

A swap function is typically simple to write as it just swaps the ownership of the internals and doesn't have to clean up existing state or allocate new resources.

Advantages of the copy and swap idiom is that it is automatically self-assignment safe and - providing that the swap operation is no-throw - is also strongly exception safe.

To be strongly exception safe, a 'hand' written assignment operator typically has to allocate a copy of the new resources before de-allocating the assignee's old resources so that if an exception occurs allocating the new resources, the old state can still be returned to. All this comes for free with copy-and-swap but is typically more complex, and hence error prone, to do from scratch.

The one thing to be careful of is to make sure that the swap method is a true swap, and not the default std::swap which uses the copy constructor and assignment operator itself.

Typically a memberwise swap is used. std::swap works and is 'no-throw' guaranteed with all basic types and pointer types. Most smart pointers can also be swapped with a no-throw guarantee.

Solution 2:

The copy constructor performs first-time initialization of objects that used to be raw memory. The assignment operator, OTOH, overrides existing values with new ones. More often than never, this involves dismissing old resources (for example, memory) and allocating new ones.

If there's a similarity between the two, it's that the assignment operator performs destruction and copy-construction. Some developers used to actually implement assignment by in-place destruction followed by placement copy-construction. However, this is a very bad idea. (What if this is the assignment operator of a base class that called during assignment of a derived class?)

What's usually considered the canonical idiom nowadays is using swap as Charles suggested:

MyClass& operator=(MyClass other)
{
    swap(other);
    return *this;
}

This uses copy-construction (note that other is copied) and destruction (it's destructed at the end of the function) -- and it uses them in the right order, too: construction (might fail) before destruction (must not fail).