Both are valid, and were the only ways of initializing objects before C++11, I think. Brace initialization has an advantage in that it allows you to initialize

Both are valid, and were the only ways of initializing objects before C++11, I think. Brace initialization has an advantage in that it allows you to initialize compound values, like containers and structs, even if they're nested: std::map<int, std::string> m = { // nested list-initialization {1, "a"}, {2, {'a', 'b', 'c'} }, {3, s1} }; Ref: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/list_initialization https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/list_initializati... https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/aggregate_initialization https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/aggregate_initial...