Question

This surprised me a little bit, but I was playing around with some code and found out that, at least on my computer, when a function accepts a parent class by reference and you pass a child instance, that the slicing problem doesn’t occur. To illustrate:

#include <iostream>

class Parent
{
public:
    virtual void doSomething()
    {
        using namespace std;
        cout << "Parent::DoSomething" << endl;
    }
};

class Child : public Parent
{
public:
    virtual void doSomething()
    {
        using namespace std;
        cout << "Child::DoSomething" << endl;
    }
};

void performSomething(Parent& parent)
{
    parent.doSomething();
}

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
    Child myChild;

    performSomething(myChild);

    return 0;
}

This prints out Child::DoSomething.

Like I said, I was a little surprised. I mean, I know that passing by reference is like passing pointers around (but much safer in my understanding), but I didn’t know I still got to keep polymorphic goodness when doing so.

I just want to make sure, is this supposed to happen or is it one of those “it works on my machine” type of instances?

Answer 1

The behavior you are seeing is correct. This is how it is supposed to work. References work just like pointers.