Best way to return list of objects in C++?

Question

It\'s been a while since I programmed in C++, and after coming from python, I feel soooo in a straight jacket, ok I\'m not gonna rant.

I have a couple of functions that

Answer 1

Another problem with returning a list of objects (opposed to working on one or two lists in place, as BigSandwich pointed out), is if your objects have complex copy constructors, those will called for each element in the container.

If you have 1000 objects each referencing a hunk of memory, and they copy that memory on Object a, b; a=b; that's 1000 memcopys for you, just for returning them contained in a container. If you still want to return a container directly, think about pointers in this case.