Understanding the weird syntax with curly braces in a constructor initializer list

Question

So I was just browsing the source code of a library when I encountered this.

Font::Font(const sf::Font& font) :
        m_font{std::make_shared

        

Answer 1

That is a list initialization aka brace initializer list. More specifically, in this case it's a direct-list initialization.

Basically the m_font variable is initialized with the value that's given in the curly braces, in this case it's initialized to a shared_ptr for the font object that's given to the constructor.