I have been struggling with this kind of problem for a long time, so I decided to ask here.

class Base {
  virtual ~Base();
};
class Derived1 : public Base { ... };
class Derived2 : public Base { ... };
...

// Copies the instance of derived class pointed by the *base pointer
Base* CreateCopy(Base* base);

The method should return a dynamically created copy, or at least store the object on stack in some data structure to avoid "returning address of a temporary" problem.

The naive approach to implement the above method would be using multiple typeids or dynamic_casts in a series of if-statements to check for each possible derived type and then use the new operator. Is there any other, better approach?

P.S.: I know, that the this problem can be avoided using smart pointers, but I am interested in the minimalistic approach, without a bunch of libraries.