Can I make a bitwise copy of a C++ object?

Question

Can C++ objects be copied using bitwise copy? I mean using memcopy_s? Is there a scenario in which that can go wrong?

Answer 1

In addition to the problem of unbalanced resource management calls in the two instance you end up with after a memcopy (as @JaredPar and @rmeador pointed), if the object supports a notion of an instance ID doing a memcopy will leave you with two instances with the same ID. This can lead to all sorts of "interesting" problems to hunt later on, especially if your objects are mapped to a database.