Calling Conventions and Pass By Reference

[Randy J. Ray]

> What other subtleties am I missing? What are the pros and cons from a 
> language and culture perspective? From an underlying implementation and 
> internals perspective?

Well, the first thing that occurs to me is that every variable access is now a 
dereference, which is going to be very wasteful for read-only parameters. In 
Java for example (yeah, yeah... "boo! hiss!") using the "final" modifier on a 
parameter allows for some decent optimization. So much so that pretty much 
every static-analysis tool I've used (PMD, Eclipse built-in rules, etc.) flags 
any method parameters and local declarations that *could* be declared final but 
aren't. It's one of the first concepts in the ORA book, "Better, Faster, 
Lighter Java".

I would also consider the actions-at-a-distance threat to be pretty 
significant. I don't want to have to worry about that sort of thing in a 
3rd-party component.

Randy
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Randy J. Ray                 Silicon Valley Scale Modelers: http://www.svsm.org
rjray at blackperl.com
randy.j.ray at gmail.com