Question

This is common in functional languages especially with TCO. I was just wondering if it provided any performance benefits besides being easier to write and keep track of. Is it just as fast to access the variables in the struct as it is to access them if they were just normal arguments? Is there any cons to this method?

Answer 1

There is no benefit, because structs are passed by value. Passing multiple arguments one by one will take the same amount of allocations from a running program as the allocation of a struct. Moreover, struct may give you worse results because of padding.

Even if you pass your struct by pointer, you would still need to allocate a new instance of your struct before passing it to the next level of invocation. Theoretically, you could get some benefit by reusing a struct that you have allocated once in multiple invocations, but in most cases that would be a micro-optimization not worth your trouble (unless your profiler indicates otherwise).