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!

  • JackbyDev@programming.dev
    3·
    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.

  • Beanie@programming.dev
    31·
    1 year ago

    My advice is to learn pure C and make a few small programs with it. You’ll see very soon why pointers are necessary.

  • collimated_thought@programming.dev
    1·
    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.

  • nitefox@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    It doesn’t “forward to”, it is a way to say “ehi, this data X is located at …”

    Imagine having a big large data structure that takes up a lot of space. You have to pass it a function to perform some operations, but if pointers didn’t exist you would have to clone those data - which is expensive memory wise and probably time wise to. So instead of wasting either space or time, you simply pass a memory address to that data and using it you can access the original data.

    Obviously if you have primitive data structures, such as integers, or that you know that aren’t expensive to clone, you can simply pass by value and call it a day (somewhere on learncpp theee is a very nice explanation of all of this)