Is it possible to prevent omission of aggregate initialization members?

Question

I have a struct with many members of the same type, like this

struct VariablePointers {
   VariablePtr active;
   VariablePtr wasactive;
   VariablePtr filename;         


        

Answer 1

The simplest way is not to give the type of the members a no-arg constructor:

struct B
{
    B(int x) {}
};
struct A
{
    B a;
    B b;
    B c;
};

int main() {

        // A a1{ 1, 2 }; // will not compile 
        A a1{ 1, 2, 3 }; // will compile 

Another option: If your members are const & , you have to initialize all of them:

struct A {    const int& x;    const int& y;    const int& z; };

int main() {

//A a1{ 1,2 };  // will not compile 
A a2{ 1,2, 3 }; // compiles OK

If you can live with one dummy const & member, you can combine that with @max66's idea of a sentinel.

struct end_of_init_list {};

struct A {
    int x;
    int y;
    int z;
    const end_of_init_list& dummy;
};

    int main() {

    //A a1{ 1,2 };  // will not compile
    //A a2{ 1,2, 3 }; // will not compile
    A a3{ 1,2, 3,end_of_init_list() }; // will compile

From cppreference https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/aggregate_initialization

If the number of initializer clauses is less than the number of members or initializer list is completely empty, the remaining members are value-initialized. If a member of a reference type is one of these remaining members, the program is ill-formed.

Another option is to take max66's sentinel idea and add some syntactic sugar for readability

struct init_list_guard
{
    struct ender {

    } static const end;
    init_list_guard() = delete;

    init_list_guard(ender e){ }
};

struct A
{
    char a;
    char b;
    char c;

    init_list_guard guard;
};

int main() {
   // A a1{ 1, 2 }; // will not compile 
   // A a2{ 1, init_list_guard::end }; // will not compile 
   A a3{ 1,2,3,init_list_guard::end }; // compiles OK