Should C++ programmer avoid memset?

Question

I heard a saying that c++ programmers should avoid memset,

class ArrInit {
    //! int a[1024] = { 0 };
    int a[1024];
public:
    ArrInit() {  memset(a, 0         


        

Answer 1

In C++ std::fill or std::fill_n may be a better choice, because it is generic and therefore can operate on objects as well as PODs. However, memset operates on a raw sequence of bytes, and should therefore never be used to initialize non-PODs. Regardless, optimized implementations of std::fill may internally use specialization to call memset if the type is a POD.