Unity Game Optimization - Third Edition

Pass by value and by reference

Technically, something is duplicated every time a data value is passed as an argument from one method to another, and this is true whether it is a value type or a reference type. When we're passing the object's data, this is known as passing by value. When we're simply copying a reference to something else, it is called passing by reference.

An important difference between value types and reference types is that a reference type is merely a pointer to another location in memory that consumes only 4 or 8-bytes in memory (32 bit or 64 bit, depending on the architecture), regardless of what it is actually pointing to. When a reference type is passed as an argument, it is only the value of this pointer that gets ...