Thread: Compare pointer to struct and struct

What do you mean - either? If you use a pointer - you still have to have the struct it points to.
Can you elaborate on your question, though?

As Xupicor says, please elaborate. What's the specific case where you can use either?

Generally, using pointers has a fixed performance cost of de-referencing the pointer. Using a value directly has a cost of making a copy, the cost of which depends on what the struct contains, it's size, and if it has a complex copy constructor.

Originally Posted by whiteflags

I would assume that comparing structures is what you want to do, because that has more meaning. If you have a field "name" for example that you want to compare, it is much more meaningful to write a function like:

Code:

int CompareEmployeeName(struct employee *lhs, struct employee *rhs)
{
    return strcmp(lhs->name, rhs->name);
}

Yes, the function takes pointers to structures as arguments, but that is for another reason, pointers are fast for the computer to copy into the function stack. It would work just as well if the arguments were plain structures.

While this is decent C, this is the C++ forum. As such this would be better written as a get_name() method in employee, that returns an std::string.