Actually having a constant reference as a member works as expected in C++ because the compiler will force you to initialize it a construction. It is true it wi

Actually having a constant reference as a member works as expected in C++ because the compiler will force you to initialize it a construction. It is true it will not check at compilation that you access a const reference of a destroyed object, but to be honest with RAII this is not really a problem as the lifetime of your objects should be pretty clear, by construction. In debug mode your program will quickly assert if you access a destroyed STL container. To be honest I think in this case: - either you want to snapshot the value and therefore you should clone the container (almost no performance cost for small containers) - you want to access the current value but then it means you know about the lifetime.