A shallow copy of an object is a duplicate that may not be fully independent of the original, in the sense that any references / pointers it holds to other objects refer to the same objects that the original's do. Use this tag for questions regarding implementing or using shallow copying methods.
Shallow copying is a process by which an object is duplicated to create a copy that may not be wholly independent of the original. Also known as "field by field" copying, this differs from deep copying with respect to the treatment of references / pointers to other objects: shallow copying copies the references / pointers held by the original, whereas deep copying makes a deep copy of each referenced object, too. Shallow copying is "shallow" in the sense that it copies only the original object itself, not any appearing deeper in its reference graph.
Related tags
Links
- Shallow copying on Wikipedia (part of the article on object copying in general)
- Shallow vs. deep copying (from learncpp.com) in the context of C/C++
