The Rules of Three, Five and Zero

The C++ programming language has a set of rules, known as RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization), which manage resources such as memory through special member functions like copy and move constructors, destructors, and assignment operators. The Rule of Three was coined in 1991 to cover most cases, but with the introduction of move semantics in C++11, it was upgraded to the Rule of Five. The Rule of Zero, introduced more recently, suggests that if no special member functions are user-defined, the compiler provides default implementations for all of them. This rule prefers a case where no special member functions need to be defined, particularly when managing pure value types or resources managed by specialized classes like smart pointers.

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