Game Development Patterns and Best Practices

Const classes as parameters

We have now discussed the default behavior when passing arrays to functions. The compiler will automatically pass in a pointer to the first element of the array. This is good for both speed and flexibility. Since only a pointer is passed in, the compiler doesn't need to spend time copying a (possibly) large array. This is also more flexible, because the function can work with arrays of all sizes instead of just a specific size.

Unfortunately, when passing structs or classes to a function, the default behavior is pass by value. We say unfortunately, because this will automatically evoke the copy constructor, which may be expensive and unnecessary if the function is only reading data from the data type. A good general ...