this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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Programming
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Pointers suck in C++. In other languages every single variable is a pointer and it works perfectly with no memory bugs and great performance.
Pass by value often uses too much memory. Especially if you have a bunch of simultaneous functions/threads/etc that all need to access the same value at once. You can get away with it when your memory is a few dozen integers, but when you're working with gigabytes of media... you need pointers. Some of the code I work with has values so large they don't even fit in RAM at all, let alone two or three copies of them. Pass by value could mean writing a hundred gigabytes to swap.
That's one reason I mentioned pass by reference "smart" languages will do it automatically depending on the size of the argument, some languages (including my beloved PHP) even have a copy-on-edit functionality where everything is technically passed as a mutable reference but as soon as you mutate it (unless it was explicitly marked as a mutable reference) it will copy the original object and have you edit the copy instead of the original.
Is being explicit about when copies happen almost always a good thing - yea the overhead of that system is undesirable in performance sensitive situations - but for a high level scripting language it's quite nice.
The way PHP does it is oddly smart