How references are internally stored in c++? [duplicate]

Question

I was just wondering, how references are internally stored? I felt that an understanding deep down that level will make me understand the concept pointer vs reference better and making decision choices.

I suspect that it basically works same as pointers but the compiler takes care of handling pointers. Please advise.

Answer 1

There's no requirement that a reference be "stored" in any way at all. As far as the language is concerned, a reference is just an alias of some existing object, and that's all that any compiler must provide.

It's entirely possible that there's no need to store anything at all if the reference is just a short-hand for some other object that's already in scope, or if a function with a reference argument gets inlined.

In situations where the reference needs to be made manifest (e.g. when calling a function in a different translation unit), you can practically implement a T & x as a T * const and treat every occurrence of x as implicitly dereferencing that pointer. Even on a higher level you can think of T & x = y; and T * const p = &y; (and correspondingly of x and *p) as essentially equivalent, so this would be an obvious way to implement references.

But of course there's no requirement, and any implementation is free to do whatever it wants.