#INFO_CPP What is the difference between shallow and deep copy? Shallow copy involves bit wise copy of the contents of one object into another object of the same type. A copy constructor and assignment operator provided by the compiler by default does shallow copy. Shallow copies create a problem when there are fields of pointer or reference type. In this case, the addresses are directly copied to another object and thus two different objects have fields pointing to the same objects. When one object is destroyed, the pointers/references in the other object become dangling pointers/references, which is dangerous. Deep copy involves using the contents of one object to create an other instance of the same class. In a deep copy, the two objects may contain the same information but the target object will have its own buffers and resources. The destruction of one object will not affect the other object. Typically, we provide our own copy constructor and assignment operator implementations for doing deep copy of objects
Posted on: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 14:20:31 +0000