== Quote from Jonathan M Davis (jmdavisp...@gmx.com)'s article > On Sunday, October 23, 2011 00:01:42 Sean Silva wrote: > They're all supposed to be reference types.
What prompted the decision for that? Doesn't that incur an extra heap allocation for the containers, and an extra level of indirection? I mean, with value-semantics like STL containers, you can use it like a value, e.g. as a local in a function, and have no overhead, but if you want to wrap a class around it and have it by reference, then you can, and it is no less efficient than if the containers were written that way. But if the containers are already by reference, you can't return them to having value semantics without adding even more indirection and inefficiency.
