Deep and Shallow Copy

Learn about types of copying data and their crucial differences. Learn how to avoid making common mistakes when copying structures, which can lead to hard-to-track bugs.

We'll cover the following

Introduction
Starting code
Copying structures
Using pointers as members
Recap

Introduction

Copying structures is a common and useful operation. However, it can raise a subtle problem. What happens when structures contain pointer members or other resources (file descriptors, sockets, and so on)? To answer the question, we’ll consider the following example. We’ll model an employee structure, which may contain the following data:

Employee’s name
Employee’s ID
Employee’s salary

Starting code

Let’s transpose this scenario in code. We define the structure at lines 4–9. Inside main, we create two employees at lines 13–14. We then print the members of e1 and e2 to see if the code works fine.

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Introduction

Stack and Local Memory

Passing Arguments to Functions

Pointer Arithmetic Basics

Pointers and Arrays

Pointers and Strings

Pointers and Functions

Complex Pointer Declarations

Assessment 1

Heap and Dynamic Memory

Structures

Practicing Everything with Linked Lists

Assessment 2

Genericity Using Void Pointers

Advanced Memory Manipulation

Project Prep: Binary Search Trees

Efficiently Processing Temperature Samples

Efficient Dictionary

Efficiently Processing Employee Records

Conclusion

Deep and Shallow Copy

Introduction

Starting code