What happens to the underlying storage upon vector's copy/move assignment?

Question

For std::vector\'s copy assignment, is reallocation of storage and shrink of capacity allowed when the source\'s size is smaller than the destination\'s capacity? Or is it

Answer 1

To answer your PS: At least for std::string, you cannot assume that the handling of strings are similar to the handling of a vector of chararacters.

COW (Copy-on-Write) is not mandatory to implement string, and not all library-implementations do this.