When working in C++, you often hear about POD types (which stands for Plain Old Data). PODs are useful for communicating with code written in other programming languages (such as C or .NET languages). They can also be copied using memcpy (which is important because this is a fast, low-level function that provides performance benefits), and have other characteristics that are key for some scenarios. However, the new C++20 standard has deprecated the concept of POD types in favor of two more refined categories, which are trivial and standard-layout types. In this post, I will discuss what these categories are and when to use instead of POD.
No more plain old data
Posted on