Question

I have a Visual Studio 2008 C++ project where I would like to heap allocate a struct and initialize it using an initializer list.

class Foo {
public:
    explicit Foo( int a );
};

struct Bar {
    Foo foo;
    int b;
};

Bar a = Bar { Foo( 1 ), 2 };      // Works!
Bar* b = new Bar{ Foo( 1 ), 2 };  // Errors!

Is there a way to do this?

Answer 1

C++11 allows it, or something very similar. Since you’re using VC 2008,
however, this won’t help you. The only solution I know is to create a
local instance with the initialization, and then pass this:

Bar forInitialization = { Foo( 1 ), 2 };
Bar* b = new Bar( forInitialization );