Is there somewhere a forum for feature requests akin to the debug forum?
I’d be convenient if the UE4 supplied containers supported initializer lists. In the same way one can initailize an std::vector (or for that mater any other std:: container, such as an unordered_map) as:
std::vector<int> myints = {1, 2, 3};
It would be nice to initialize a TArray as:
TArray<int> myints = {1, 2, 3};
However, it doesn’t support this. Among other things, that tends to drag what should ideally be const data to be non-const as the first apparent alternative is a series of .Add()s into the container. Also, much of the API accepts such containers, and it’s a lot nicer to supply an inline { } list than go through the gyrations of manual construction. It makes for less code.
The only reason I could see that this might not be supported is the fact initializer lists are from C++11 and there may be issues with some of the compilers UE supports, not having full '11 support yet (MSVC definitely has some issues with C++14 from what I’ve seen, wouldn’t surprise me that they don’t fully do everything from '11 yet either).
That aside though, this would be pretty handy.
Good point Twiddle, it is new with C++11, so they might have to wait for some older compilers to age off into obsolescence. I think newer MSVC’s support it (probably >= 2013), but VS2012 still had some major holes in their C++11 support, so it might not, and there are still folks using that version.
I have noticed UE4 uses some c++11 features in the code base, like the override keyword, so they’re at least not avoiding 11 entirely.
I might take a crack at adding this on my local source base, just to TArrays, to see how that goes.
(aside: I fixed my second example above which was meant to say TArray rather than std::vector)