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In the C++ programming language, a reference is a simple reference datatype that is less powerful but safer than the pointer type inherited from C.The name C++ reference may cause confusion, as in computer science a reference is a general concept datatype, with pointers and C++ references being specific reference datatype implementations.
Since C++11, the C++ standard library also provides smart pointers (unique_ptr, shared_ptr and weak_ptr) which can be used in some situations as a safer alternative to primitive C pointers. C++ also supports another form of reference, quite different from a pointer, called simply a reference or reference type.
In computer programming, a reference is a value that enables a program to indirectly access a particular datum, such as a variable's value or a record, in the computer's memory or in some other storage device. The reference is said to refer to the datum, and accessing the datum is called dereferencing the reference. A reference is distinct from ...
One commonly encountered difference is C being more weakly-typed regarding pointers. Specifically, C allows a void* pointer to be assigned to any pointer type without a cast, while C++ does not; this idiom appears often in C code using malloc memory allocation, [9] or in the passing of context pointers to the POSIX pthreads API, and other ...
Many languages have explicit pointers or references. Reference types differ from these in that the entities they refer to are always accessed via references; for example, whereas in C++ it's possible to have either a std:: string and a std:: string *, where the former is a mutable string and the latter is an explicit pointer to a mutable string (unless it's a null pointer), in Java it is only ...
In C and C++, constructs such as pointer type conversion and union — C++ adds reference type conversion and reinterpret_cast to this list — are provided in order to permit many kinds of type punning, although some kinds are not actually supported by the standard language.
Objects that are shared but not owned can be accessed via a reference, raw pointer, or iterator (a conceptual generalisation of pointers). However, by the same token, C++ provides native ways for users to opt-into such functionality: C++11 provides reference counted smart pointers, via the std::shared_ptr class, enabling automatic shared memory ...
Smart pointers typically keep track of the memory they point to, and may also be used to manage other resources, such as network connections and file handles. Smart pointers were first popularized in the programming language C++ during the first half of the 1990s as rebuttal to criticisms of C++'s lack of automatic garbage collection. [1] [2]