When is it not a good idea to pass by reference?

Question

This is a memory allocation issue that I\'ve never really understood.

void unleashMonkeyFish()  
{  
    MonkeyFish * monkey_fish = new MonkeyFish();
    std::string          


        

Answer 1

As a simple rule of thumb store your data as a copy within a class, and pass and return data by (const) reference, use reference counting pointers wherever possible.

I'm not so concerned about copying a few 1000s bytes of string data, until such time that the profiler says it is a significant cost. OTOH I do care that the data structures that hold several 10s of MBs of data don't get copied.