Question

In a practical environment, using gcc or MS Visual Studio, is it bad to pass the value types which are the same size or less than an int by const reference ?

i.e. is it bad to write such a function:

void f(const bool& b);

or

void f(const char& c);

rather than:

void f(bool b);

or

void f(char c);

The reason I am asking is that I do not see the benefit of passing a reference in these cases but maybe I am missing something.

Answer 1

It may be slightly bad, or it may not have an effect at all (depends on where the original value is stored, how good the optimizer is, and how it decides to treat your code).

The standard doesn’t mandate how references are to be implemented, but in practice compilers implement references using pointers. Therefore in the general case a bool& would be implemented using a bool*, which means that to access the bool you need an extra pointer dereference each time. Since a bool is no bigger than a pointer, there’s no reduced memory footprint or less byte copying to offset this drawback.

As a result the accepted practice is to pass primitives around as values since it’s more efficient. Of course although passing such around as references won’t really blow up anything, and unless you are accessing the value inside a loop will probably not even result in any measurable difference.