Question

I have a class where I use this to initialize a void* pointer. But the problem is, when I pass an instance of that class by value, the pointer will not change to the new address on the stack. So, I thought to override the copy constructor to reassign the pointer with the new address of this. But I need variables to call the super-class constructor, which I normally get by constructor-parameters, but I don’t have them in my copy constructor…

I hope I explained well…

So the question is: can I keep the procedure of the default copy-constructor, where I add the part of reassigning the pointer? Or are there better alternatives?

Thanks

Here is a some code:

class GetsCopiedByValue : public SuperClass
{
    GetsCopiedByValue(Type1 *t1, Type2 *t2, float var1, /* A lot of other things I need */) :
         SuperClass(t1, t2), var1(var1)
    {
         t1->set_GetsCopiedByValue_Address(this);  // ***
    }
}

Somewhere else:

{
    GetsCopiedByValue instance (t1, t2, 4.64, /* All the other things */);
    SomeType *t = new SomeType(instance); // <-- here, it gets copied by value,
}  // but the original "instance" goes (here) out of scope and the address 
   // I assigned (***) is not longer valid, so I have to
   // reassign the address to the new address, after copying it.

Answer 1

Not sure if this helps, but you can actually call the superclass copy constructor in your copy constructor:

GetsCopiedByValue(GetsCopiedByValue const& other) :
     SuperClass(other), var1(other.var1)
{
     t1->set_GetsCopiedByValue_Address(this);
}

But I think that even if you omit this base-class constructor call, C++ will insert it for you.