this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
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Programming

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[Noob here] Can someone explain to me the advantage of mutable objects? (lemmy.world)
submitted 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) by amon@lemmy.world to c/programming@programming.dev
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It makes the code icky and hard to debug, and you can simply return new immutable objects for every state change.

EDIT: why not just create a new object and reassign variable to point to the new object

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[โ€“] Michal@programming.dev 7 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

Because recreating entire object just to make a single change is dumb.

God help you if you've already passed the object by reference and have to chase up all the references to point at the new version!

[โ€“] sudo@programming.dev 2 points 4 hours ago

You can safely do a shallow copy and re-use references to the unchanged members if you have some guarantee that those members are also immutable. Its called Persistent Data Structures. But that's a feature of the language and usually necessitates a GC.