How to do the equivalent of memset(this, …) without clobbering the vtbl?

Question

I know that memset is frowned upon for class initialization. For example, something like the following:

class X { public: 
X() { memset( this,          


        

Answer 1

This is hideous, but you could overload operator new/delete for these objects (or in a common base class), and have the implementation provide zero'd out buffers. Something like this :

class HideousBaseClass
{
public:
    void* operator new( size_t nSize )
    {
        void* p = malloc( nSize );
        memset( p, 0, nSize );
        return p;
    }
    void operator delete( void* p )
    {
        if( p )
            free( p );
    }
};

One could also override the global new/delete operators, but this could have negative perf implications.

Edit: I just realized that this approach won't work for stack allocated objects.