Hmm, so vectors seem to be able to do some pretty death-defying stuff! 
They're variable size, but they manage their memory automatically.

Now in a GC language, you can just pass anything anywhere. Usually in a 
language with manual memory management you have to be extremely careful 
about doing that.

However, vectors seem to make this surprisingly safe. Indeed, it appears 
that you can pass a vector in any way that you could pass something like 
an integer, and it will just do The Right Thing(tm). The only difference 
is that throwing a large vector around by value probably isn't a good idea.

Is that about right?

Here's another question: Suppose you have a function that's supposed to 
create a new vector and return it to the caller. What's the best way to 
do that?

Obviously the ideal thing to do would be to return a reference. However, 
if I create a vector in an auto variable, presumably when the function 
returns that variable will vanish, making the reference to it unusable. 
(If I'm understanding how this works.)

I guess if I return it by value the problem goes away. But that doesn't 
seem terribly efficient.

Maybe the thing to do would be to have the caller pass in a reference to 
an empty vector created outside?

Just trying to get my head round this stuff so I don't do anything dumb...

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