Question

Say I have a class, something like the following;

class MyClass
{
public:
  MyClass();
  int a,b,c;
  double x,y,z;
};

#define  PageSize 1000000

MyClass Array1[PageSize],Array2[PageSize];

If my class has not pointers or virtual methods, is it safe to use the following?

memcpy(Array1,Array2,PageSize*sizeof(MyClass));

The reason I ask, is that I’m dealing with very large collections of paged data, as decribed here, where performance is critical, and memcpy offers significant performance advantages over iterative assignment. I suspect it should be ok, as the ‘this’ pointer is an implicit parameter rather than anything stored, but are there any other hidden nasties I should be aware of?

Edit:

As per sharptooths comments, the data does not include any handles or similar reference information.

As per Paul R’s comment, I’ve profiled the code, and avoiding the copy constructor is about 4.5 times faster in this case. Part of the reason here is that my templated array class is somewhat more complex than the simplistic example given, and calls a placement ‘new’ when allocating memory for types that don’t allow shallow copying. This effectively means that the default constructor is called as well as the copy constructor.

Second edit

It is perhaps worth pointing out that I fully accept that use of memcpy in this way is bad practice and should be avoided in general cases. The specific case in which it is being used is as part of a high performance templated array class, which includes a parameter ‘AllowShallowCopying’, which will invoke memcpy rather than a copy constructor. This has big performance implications for operations such as removing an element near the start of an array, and paging data in and out of secondary storage. The better theoretical solution would be to convert the class to a simple structure, but given this involves a lot of refactoring of a large code base, avoiding it is not something I’m keen to do.

Answer 1

According to the Standard, if no copy constructor is provided by the programmer for a class, the compiler will synthesize a constructor which exhibits default memberwise initialization. (12.8.8) However, in 12.8.1, the Standard also says,

A class object can be copied in two
ways, by initialization (12.1, 8.5),
including for function argument
passing (5.2.2) and for function value
return (6.6.3), and by assignment
(5.17). Conceptually, these two
operations are implemented by a copy
constructor (12.1) and copy assignment
operator (13.5.3).

The operative word here is “conceptually,” which, according to Lippman gives compiler designers an ‘out’ to actually doing memberwise initialization in “trivial” (12.8.6) implicitly defined copy constructors.

In practice, then, compilers have to synthesize copy constructors for these classes that exhibit behavior as if they were doing memberwise initialization. But if the class exhibits “Bitwise Copy Semantics” (Lippman, p. 43) then the compiler does not have to synthesize a copy constructor (which would result in a function call, possibly inlined) and do bitwise copy instead. This claim is apparently backed up in the ARM, but I haven’t looked this up yet.

Using a compiler to validate that something is Standard-compliant is always a bad idea, but compiling your code and viewing the resulting assembly seems to verify that the compiler is not doing memberwise initialization in a synthesized copy constructor, but doing a memcpy instead:

#include <cstdlib>

class MyClass
{
public:
    MyClass(){};
  int a,b,c;
  double x,y,z;
};

int main()
{
    MyClass c;
    MyClass d = c;

    return 0;
}

The assembly generated for MyClass d = c; is:

000000013F441048  lea         rdi,[d] 
000000013F44104D  lea         rsi,[c] 
000000013F441052  mov         ecx,28h 
000000013F441057  rep movs    byte ptr [rdi],byte ptr [rsi] 

…where 28h is the sizeof(MyClass).

This was compiled under MSVC9 in Debug mode.

EDIT:

The long and the short of this post is that:

1) So long as doing a bitwise copy will exhibit the same side effects as memberwise copy would, the Standard allows trivial implicit copy constructors to do a memcpy instead of memberwise copies.

2) Some compilers actually do memcpys instead of synthesizing a trivial copy constructor which does memberwise copies.