Synopsis

(Required) A function shall not return a reference or a pointer to an automatic variable (including parameters), defined within the function.

Enabled by default

Yes

Severity/Certainty

High/High

Full description

A stack object is returned from a function as a reference. This check is identical to MEM-stack-ref, MISRAC++2023-6.8.2_a.

Coding standards

Code examples

The following code example fails the check and will give a warning:

int& example(void) {
  int x;
  return x;
}

The following code example passes the check and will not give a warning about this issue:

int example(void) {
  int x;
  return x;
}