5 ms·

It shouldn't be a matter of preference. Use a pointer if you need it to be relocatable or if you need it to be optional (it may be nullptr). Otherwise use a ref

• pizza 4y ago
  I am not familiar with the capabilities of the compiler but is there any optimization reason to prefer references as well? Like the compiler may be able to figure out an efficient way to keep a referenced object ‘nearby’ for subsequent function calls that also refer to the object, maybe in some register or reordering which code gets run when. Whereas sometimes the compiler might not be able to do something like that with a pointer, incurring mem access costs. Hm slightly tangential but could you install some kind of page-fault handler on a reference such that the control flow jumps on write back to the last place it was accessed? Not that you’d want to do that in the real world, but it would be an interesting “pub-sub” type control flow..
  • Sharlin 4y ago
    In C++, there are no differences between pointer and reference semantics except that the former are a) nullable and b) reseatable (can be changed to point to something else).
• amalcon 4y ago
  The other major use-case is where other code constrains you, e.g. it's being passed as a callback to a C library. There are also a number of cases where passing a pointer into a template function can be more concise. E.g. since pointers are iterators, if you have a generic function that iterates over things and you just want it to look at one thing (or zero) for testing, you can usually do this with pointer arithmetic.