Is it a good practice to pass struct object as parameter to a function in c++?

Question

I tried an example live below:

typedef struct point
{
    int x;
    int y;
} point;

void cp(point p)
{
    cout<<p.x<<endl;
    cout<<p.y<<endl;
}

int main()
{
    point p1;
    p1.x=1;
    p1.y=2;
    cp(p1);
}

The result thats printed out is:

1
2

which is what I expected. My question is: Does parameter p get the full copy of object p1? If so, I wonder if this is a good practice? (I assumed when the struct gets big in size, this will create a lot of copy overhead).

Answer 1

There is nothing wrong with passing structs as parameters. Everything is passed by value in C++ so a full copy is indeed made.

The struct you gave in your example is small so it's probably not a problem if you pass it by value. But if you work with bigger data structures, you may want to pass it by reference.

Beware though, passing by reference means that if you modify the struct inside your function, your original struct will be modified. Be sure to use the const keyword in every case where you don't modify the struct. This will give you an immediate information about if your functions do modify the information or not.

Your example could be modified to work with references this way :

typedef struct point
{
    int x;
    int y;
} point;

void cp(const point& p) // You can know that cp doesn't modify your struct
{
    cout<<p.x<<endl;
    cout<<p.y<<endl;
}

void mod_point(point& p) // You can know that mod_points modifies your struct
{
    p.x += 1;
    p.y += 1;
}

int main()
{
    point p1;
    p1.x=1;
    p1.y=2;
    cp(p1);
    mod_point(p1);
    cp(p1); // will output 2 and 3
}