It depends on what you mean by “cost”, and properties of the host system (hardware, operating system) with respect to operations. If your cost measure is memory usage, then the calculation of cost is obvious – add up the sizes of whatever is being copied. If your measure is execution speed (or “efficiency”) then the … Read more
Arguments are passed by value, unless the function signature specifies otherwise: in void foo(type arg), arg is passed by value regardless of whether type is a simple type, a pointer type or a class type, in void foo(type& arg), arg is passed by reference. In case of arrays, the value that is passed is a … Read more
Types of Things in Swift The rule is: Class instances are reference types (i.e. your reference to a class instance is effectively a pointer) Functions are reference types Everything else is a value type; “everything else” simply means instances of structs and instances of enums, because that’s all there is in Swift. Arrays and strings … Read more