Why should I use a pointer rather than the object itself?

Question

I\'m coming from a Java background and have started working with objects in C++. But one thing that occurred to me is that people often use pointers to objects rather than t

Answer 1

This is has been discussed at length, but in Java everything is a pointer. It makes no distinction between stack and heap allocations (all objects are allocated on the heap), so you don't realize you're using pointers. In C++, you can mix the two, depending on your memory requirements. Performance and memory usage is more deterministic in C++ (duh).