What is the difference between deep and shallow copy?

Question

Accepted Answer

Deep copy creates a new object and recursively copies all the objects it references, while shallow copy creates a new object and references the same objects as the original.

Deep copy creates a completely independent copy of an object, including all nested objects.
Shallow copy creates a new object, but references the same nested objects as the original.
Deep copy is useful when you want to modify one object without affecting the other.
Shallow copy is useful when you want to create a new object that shares some data with the original.
In Python, you can use the 'copy' module to perform deep and shallow copies.

Accepted Answer

Shallow copy is used when a new instance type gets created and it keeps the values that are copied in the new instance. Shallow copy is used to copy the reference pointers just like it copies the values. These references point to the original objects and the changes made in any member of the class will also affect the original copy of it. Shallow copy allows faster execution of the program and it depends on the size of the data that is used.

Deep copy is used to store the values that are already copied. Deep copy doesn’t copy the reference pointers to the objects. It makes the reference to an object and the new object that is pointed by some other object gets stored. The changes made in the original copy won’t affect any other copy that uses the object. Deep copy makes execution of the program slower due to making certain copies for each object that is been called.

What is the difference between deep and shallow copy?

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