An aggregate type in C++ is a type that can be initialised with a brace-enclosed list of initialisers. C++ contains three basic aggregate types, inherited from C:

arrays

structures

unions

Since one of the design goals of C++ was to emulate the behaviour of built-in types it seems reasonable that you should be able to initialise user-defined aggregate types (containers, etc.) in the same way.

A std::initializer_list is a template class that allows a user-defined type to become an aggregate type.

When initialiser list syntax is used the compiler generates a std::initializer_list object containing the initialisation objects. A std::initializer_list is a simple container class that may be queried for its size; or iterated through.

If the class contains a constructor that takes a std::initializer_list as a parameter, this constructor is invoked and the std::initializer_list object passed.

Note, there is some syntactic sugar at work here – the lack of brackets ([]) in the declaration of aggr forces the compiler to construct the std::initializer_list (then call aggr‘s constructor) rather than creating an array of three Aggregate objects.

This is also a good place to insert some words of caution: Adding std::initializer_list constructor overloads may lead to unexpected results:

If a class has constructors overloaded for T and std::initializer_list<T> the compiler will always prefer the std::initializer_list overload. However, if you’ve provided a default constructor the compiler will always prefer that to calling the std::initializer_list overload with an empty initialiser list.

Initialiser lists can begin to look like so much magic and ‘handwavium’, so a brief look at an implementation of std::initializer_list is useful to dispel the mysticism:

When the compiler creates an std::initializer_list the elements of the list are constructed on the stack (or in static memory, depending on the scope of the initializer_list).

The compiler then creates the initializer_list object that holds the address of the first element and one-past-the-end of the last element. Note that the initializer_list is very small (two pointers) so can be passed by copy without a huge overhead; it does not pass the initialiser objects themselves. Once the initializer_list has been copied the receiver can access the elements and do whatever needs to be done with them.

Since C++11 all the STL containers support std::initializer_list construction; so now lists and vectors can be initialised in the same way as built-in arrays.

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