this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Why use pointers? (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago by lenninscjay@lemm.ee to c/cpp@programming.dev
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Hey all, teaching myself CPP through a few books (and a little bit of CS in general through CS50) and hit a road block.

I understand what pointers are, and understand they’re a big part of programming. My question is why?

What do you use pointers for? Why is forwarding to a new memory address preferable to just changing the variable/replacing what’s already at the memory address or at a new one? Is it because new data could exceed the size of that address already allocated?

Thanks in advance!

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[–] collimated_thought@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Something else that people haven't touched on yet is dynamic memory allocation. Whenever you create a new object you'll need a reference to it. That reference is a pointer.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

Some things are too big to store on the stack and you need them in the heap. Those two words may be gibberish right now but it gives you a new thing to learn.