C++ functions returning arrays

Question

I am sort of new to C++. I am used to programming in Java. This particular problem is causing me great issues, because C++ is not acting like Java when it is dealing with Ar

Answer 1

Because your array is stack allocated. Moving from Java to C++, you have to be very careful about the lifetime of objects. In Java, everything is heap allocated and is garbage collected when no references to it remain.

Here however, you define a stack allocated array a, which is destroyed when you exit the function getArray. This is one of the (many) reasons vectors are preferred to plain arrays - they handle allocation and deallocation for you.

#include 

std::vector getArray() 
{
    std::vector a = {1, 2, 3};
    return a;
}