This may be a bit of a newbie question but here goes anyway.
I'm writing a very cpu intensive program and therefore want to optimize as much as possible. I just wanted to know if passing objects by pointer is faster than passing them by reference. It would seem to me that both methods should be about the same, but I would like the opinion of someone more knowledgeable than myself. Thanks.
I e-mailed bjarne stroustrup (creator of c++) about this a year ago, and he said there's no difference.
http://www.flashdaddee.com/forums/sh...ght=stroustrup
A quote from it: ('>' is me, he responds)
>this makes a potential scanf in c++ more elegant to use, and to create. my
>point is that this seemingly easy to implement idea is neglected in C but
>added in C++ on the basis of its relationship to the equivalent assembly
>language commands.
>
>what do you think? thank you for your time.
Remember that access through a reference will involve exactly the same machine
operations as access through a pointer for equivalent uses.
