What are POD types in C++?

c++ types c++-faq
paxos1977 picture paxos1977 · Sep 28, 2008 · Viewed 329.5k times · Source

I've come across this term POD-type a few times.
What does it mean?

Answer

Greg Hewgill picture Greg Hewgill · Sep 28, 2008

POD stands for Plain Old Data - that is, a class (whether defined with the keyword struct or the keyword class) without constructors, destructors and virtual members functions. Wikipedia's article on POD goes into a bit more detail and defines it as:

A Plain Old Data Structure in C++ is an aggregate class that contains only PODS as members, has no user-defined destructor, no user-defined copy assignment operator, and no nonstatic members of pointer-to-member type.

Greater detail can be found in this answer for C++98/03. C++11 changed the rules surrounding POD, relaxing them greatly, thus necessitating a follow-up answer here.

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