Pointer Member Variable Initialization in C++ Classes

Question

This is going to sound so basic as to make one think I made zero effort to find the answer myself, but I swear I did search for about 20 minutes and found no answer.

Answer 1

The value will be uninitialised so yes you do need to explicitly initialise it to nullptr.

Using smart pointers (std::unique_ptr, std::shared_ptr, boost::shared_ptr, etc.) would mean that you don't need to do this explicitly.