Reference in place of getters?

Question

in C++ is it a bad practice to use reference in place of getters?

for example:

class X
{
    int mP;
 public:
    const int& P;
    X():P(mP){}
}; 
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Answer 1

Just think about refactoring to make the access thread safe, that won't work well this way and require a lot of changes in the client classes/functions.

If you have class members, that are guaranteed not to be changed over lifetime of the instance, you can simply provide const int P; and initialize it properly in your class' constructors.

If the value is to be visible class wide use a static const int P;

In any other case use a public getter:

int P() const; // a return type of 'const int &' would be redundant  

1st shot implementation:

int X::P() const
{
    return mP;
}

Thread safe implementation:

class X {
{
    // ...
private:
    // ...
    mutable std::mutex internalDataGuard;
};

int X::P() const
{
    std::lock(internalDataGuard);
    return mP;
}

Answer 2

None of this is good:

class X { public: int x; };
class X {
    private: int m_x;
    public: const int& get() const { return m_x; }
    public: void set(const int& other)  { m_x = other; } 
};
class X {
    private: int m_x;
    public: const int& x() const { return m_x; }
    public: void x(const int& other)  { m_x = other; } 
};
class X {
    private: int m_x;
    public: const int& x() const { return m_x; }
    public: int& x()  { return m_x; }
};

Pick one, it's a design decision.

Having 'const int& x' to publish the private member will work:

class X {
    private: int m_x;
    public: const int& x;
    public: X() : m_x(0), x(m_x) {}
    // Take care for copy and assignment
};

The cost is a larger memory footprint.