Object Oriented Programming Questions Medium
In object-oriented programming, shallow copy and deep copy are two different ways of copying objects.
Shallow copy creates a new object and copies the values of the original object's fields into the new object. However, if the fields of the original object are references to other objects, the shallow copy will only copy the references, not the actual objects. This means that both the original object and the copied object will point to the same referenced objects. Any changes made to the referenced objects will be reflected in both the original and copied objects.
On the other hand, deep copy creates a new object and recursively copies the values of all the fields, including the referenced objects. This means that the copied object will have its own separate copies of all the referenced objects. Any changes made to the referenced objects will not affect the original object or the copied object.
To summarize, the main difference between shallow copy and deep copy is that shallow copy only copies the references to the referenced objects, while deep copy creates separate copies of the referenced objects.