Struct vs Class, take II

[nuzzle]

Besides the visibility of members,

Structs are value types and classes are reference types.

As you know, value types are allocated on the stack or inline as a part of another object while classes are allocated on the heap.

Struct is often a small object that needs to be treated like a primitive type while classes are normally used for implementation requiring more processing power. In other words, classes would normally be used to implement a piece of business logic, rather than to support data related or primitive-type objects.

I hope this clears it up a bit.

Although your description roughly follows common usage I think it's worth mentioning that the roles you assign to the class and the struct are a historical convention and nothing that's stipulated by the language.

In fact the struct and the class are conceptually equivalent in C++. Nothing prevents anyone from using them in the exact opposite manner from what you state.

I mention this because making struct and class to be equals was a very important design decision as explained by Stroustrup in The Design and Evolution of C++ on page 76.