I'm a C++ developer, and I'm mixed on this decision... On one hand, memcpy is a function that you can really hurt yourself with. On the other, it maps to extremely fast assembly that most processors can perform very quickly. There is a time & a place for everything. I think that a memcpy inside a class' constructor or assignment functions is perfectly acceptable, yet doing a memcpy(&destclass, &fromclass, sizeof(destclass)) is fundamentally dumb for more reasons than I care to illucidate (read one of Stroudstrup's or Meyer's books on C++ if you want to know). Doing something like that *really* demonstrates that you don't know the language.
I guess Microsoft is trying to get people that don't understand C++ to program better in the language. IMHO, this will not solve fundamental problems with people programming C++, just cause them to learn the language slower by not having an experience working through a bastard of a bug. I think the world (and not just MS) needs to realize that writing a piece of complex software is difficult. Bugs like an errant memcpy of a subclass into a baseclass instance are *very* easy bugs to solve if you're looking for them. Memory overwrites are easy to detect if you are looking for them. Bad pointers are easy to detect if you're looking for them.
Such problems will always exist in software. I've found a fair number in my own code. What we *really* need to do is train a better caliber of programmer.
OTOH, Microsoft seems hell-bent on trying to make writing software easy to do
