Section summary

Important things to remember:

• the deepcopy() method creates and persists new instances of source objects, whereas any shallow copy operation only stores references to the original memory address;
• a deep copy operation takes significantly more time than any shallow copy operation;
• the deepcopy() method copies the whole object, including all nested objects; it’s an example of practical recursion taking place;
• deep copy might cause problems when there are cyclic references in the structure to be copied.