hit counter

Timeline

My development logbook

Item 22: Prefer Pass-by-reference to Pass-by-value

First advantage: avoid the calling of copy constructor for parameters in a function call. Good for efficiency.

Secondly, it avoids this kind of error:

A function takes a base class parameter using pass-by-value. The caller of the function passes in a derived class instance to this function. The copy constructor will construct an instance of the base class and thereby strip off all subclass related information.