Summary
This episode continues the discussion on the cost of C++ constructs in debug builds by examining default member initializers introduced in C++11. Jason demonstrates how using default member initializers (assigning values directly in the class definition) results in cleaner, more readable code compared to the traditional C++98/03 approach of initializing members in constructors. Using compiler output comparisons between GCC and Clang at optimization level 0, he shows that default member initializers can also produce more efficient code in debug builds, even though these differences disappear with optimizations enabled.