title: Struct inheritance vs class inheritance in C++
body: <p>I just discovered from this <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/979211/struct-inheritance-in-c">Q/A</a> that structs are inheritable in C++ but, is it a good practice, or is it preferable to use classes? In which cases is preferable and in which ones is not?</p>
  
  <p>I have never needed this, but now I have a bunch of messages of different types, but same longitude. I got them in binary in a char array, and I just copy them with memcpy to the struct to fill its fields (I don't know if it is even possible to do it with std::copy).</p>
  
  <p>I guess it would be great to be able to inherit every struct from a base struct with common headers, that is why I searched for this. So a second question would be: if I do this with classes, is it possible to do a memcpy (or std:copy) from a buffer to a class?</p>