Reference in place of getters?

Question

in C++ is it a bad practice to use reference in place of getters?

for example:

class X
{
    int mP;
 public:
    const int& P;
    X():P(mP){}
}; 
<         


        

Answer 1

Just think about refactoring to make the access thread safe, that won't work well this way and require a lot of changes in the client classes/functions.

If you have class members, that are guaranteed not to be changed over lifetime of the instance, you can simply provide const int P; and initialize it properly in your class' constructors.

If the value is to be visible class wide use a static const int P;

In any other case use a public getter:

int P() const; // a return type of 'const int &' would be redundant  

1st shot implementation:

int X::P() const
{
    return mP;
}

Thread safe implementation:

class X {
{
    // ...
private:
    // ...
    mutable std::mutex internalDataGuard;
};

int X::P() const
{
    std::lock(internalDataGuard);
    return mP;
}