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

You could make the string in unleashMonkeyFish static but I don't think that really helps anything (and could be quite bad depending on how this is implemented).

I've moved "down" from higher-level languages (like C#, Java) and have hit this same issue recently. I assume that often the only choice is to copy the string.