C++11 standard provides new form of objects initialization which makes such initialization uniform for different structs and classes and simplify objects construction and initialization process. Thanks to the new process we can initialize many different classes using the same syntax. Please take a look on the example below: Output of this example is: In point I we are initializing class of two different objects using C++11 uniform initialization mechanism. On object is created based on struct type (pure struct type without any method - look point II). The second one is created based on MyClass class constructor. As you can see, despite that we are creating objects of two totally different types, those objects can be created the same way (uniform way). This is just uniform unitialization featuere provided in C++11 standard. Below we are initializating MyStruct object using external function getMyStruct() . You can take a look to the body of that function (point IV).