On Friday, 27 December 2013 at 16:08:09 UTC, Jonathan wrote:
Let me just check my understanding: If a function says it returns a thing of type T, it really does return something whose outermost shape is T; however, if it contains pointers to other things, and these were stack allocated, the pointers might be readdressed.
The pointers remain exactly how they were, but stack allocated memory is released when the function that allocated it returns (that's just how the stack works, it's temporary scratch space for functions) so the pointers are left pointing to garbage.
