Question

Possible Duplicate:
Should accessors return values or constant references?

First of all, let’s ignore the setters and getters are/aren’t evil. 🙂

My question is, if I have a class that has some std:: container as a member, let’s say string, what should the return type of the getter be? I kind of prefer const T& compared to T for performance reasons… I know that most of the time users will make a copy anyway, but I guess not all the time. Am I wrong?

So in general what is better:

std::string get_name() const;

OR

const std::string& get_name() const;

Answer 1

Return a constant reference. If the user wants to make a copy, no skin off your back.