[kevincox]

What do you mean by assigning to a pointer? You can only assign a pointer value to a pointer variable and you need to get that pointer from & IIUC.

[masklinn]

> What do you mean by assigning to a pointer?

    *x = y

[kevincox]

I don't think that does because IIUC you are copying the bits of y to x. So I guess semantically y has escaped but you aren't doing a new heap allocation, you are reusing the memory of x.