As I have understood from the QT docs, the advantages of the implicit sharing mechanism is that you can pass copy of objects as arguments without the need of copying large amounts of data (until you modify the contents). But aren't you able to obtain the same result by using standard c++ references (I mean the & in the arguments to functions)?

I am sure I am missing something, so if someone can explain, I would appreciate it a lot.

Thanks in advance,
Jorge