Monday, 14 December 2015
Shallow Copy Vs Deep Copy:
A shallow copy of an object copies all of the member field values. This works well if the fields are values, but may not be what you want for fields that point to dynamically allocated memory. The pointer will be copied but the memory it points to will not be copied -- the field in both the original object and the copy will then point to the same dynamically allocated memory, which is not usually what you want. The default copy constructor and assignment operator make shallow copies.
A deep copy copies all fields, and makes copies of dynamically allocated memory pointed to by the fields. To make a deep copy, writes a copy constructor and overload the assignment operator, otherwise the copy will point to the original, with disastrous consequences.
