When should I pass or return a struct by value?

Question

A struct can be either passed/returned by value or passed/returned by reference (via a pointer) in C.

The general consensus seems to be that the former can be applied to small structs without penalty in most cases. See Is there any case for which returning a structure directly is good practice? and Are there any downsides to passing structs by value in C, rather than passing a pointer?

And that avoiding a dereference can be beneficial from both a speed and clarity perspective. But what counts as small? I think we can all agree that this is a small struct:

struct Point { int x, y; };

That we can pass by value with relative impunity:

struct Point sum(struct Point a, struct Point b) {
  return struct Point { .x = a.x + b.x, .y = a.y + b.y };
}

And that Linux's task_struct is a large struct:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/b953c0d234bc72e8489d3bf51a276c5c4ec85345/include/linux/sched.h#L1292-1727

That we'd want to avoid putting on the stack at all costs (especially with those 8K kernel mode stacks!). But what's about middling ones? I assume structs smaller than a register are fine. But what about these?

typedef struct _mx_node_t mx_node_t;
typedef struct _mx_edge_t mx_edge_t;

struct _mx_edge_t {
  char symbol;
  size_t next;
};

struct _mx_node_t {
  size_t id;
  mx_edge_t edge[2];
  int action;
};

What is the best rule of thumb for determining whether a struct is small enough that it's safe to pass it around by value (short of extenuating circumstances such as some deep recursion)?

Lastly please don't tell me that I need to profile. I'm asking for a heuristic to use when I'm too lazy/it's not worth it to investigate further.

EDIT: I have two followup questions based on the answers so far:

1. What if the struct is actually smaller than a pointer to it?

2. What if a shallow copy is the desired behavior (the called function will perform a shallow copy anyway)?

EDIT: Not sure why this got marked as a possible duplicate as I actually link the other question in my question. I'm asking for clarification on what constitutes a small struct and am well aware that most of the time structs should be passed by reference.

Answer 1

in an abstract way a set of data values passed to a function is a structure by value, albeit undeclared as such. you can declare a function as a structure, in some cases requiring a type definition. when you do this everything is on the stack. and that is the problem. by putting your data values on the stack it becomes vulnerable to over writing if a function or sub is called with parameters before you utilize or copy the data elsewhere. it is best to use pointers and classes.

Answer 2

On small embedded architectures (8/16-bitters) -- always pass by pointer, as non-trivial structures don't fit into such tiny registers, and those machines are generally register-starved as well.

On PC-like architectures (32 and 64 bit processors) -- passing a structure by value is OK provided sizeof(mystruct_t) <= 2*sizeof(mystruct_t*) and the function does not have many (usually more than 3 machine words' worth of) other arguments. Under these circumstances, a typical optimizing compiler will pass/return the structure in a register or register pair. However, on x86-32, this advice should be taken with a hefty grain of salt, due to the extraordinary register pressure a x86-32 compiler must deal with -- passing a pointer may still be faster due to reduced register spilling and filling.

Returning a structure by value on PC-likes, on the other hand, follows the same rule, save for the fact that when a structure is returned by pointer, the structure to be filled out should be passed in by pointer as well -- otherwise, the callee and the caller are stuck having to agree on how to manage the memory for that structure.

Answer 3

My experience, nearly 40 years of real-time embedded, last 20 using C; is that the best way is to pass a pointer.

In either case the address of the struct needs to be loaded, then the offset for the field of interest needs to be calculated...

When passing the whole struct, if it is not passed by reference, then

1. it is not placed on the stack
2. it is copied, usually by a hidden call to memcpy()
3. it is copied to a section of memory that is now 'reserved' and unavailable to any other part of the program.

Similar considerations exist for when a struct is returned by value.

However, "small" structs, that can be completely held in a working register to two are passed in those registers especially if certain levels of optimization are used in the compile statement.

The details of what is considered 'small' depend on the compiler and the underlying hardware architecture.

Answer 4

Really the best rule of thumb, when it comes to passing a struct as argument to a function by reference vs by value, is to avoid passing it by value. The risks almost always outweigh the benefits.

For the sake of completeness I'll point out that when passing/returning a struct by value a few things happen:

1. all the structure's members are copied on the stack
2. if returning a struct by value, again, all members are copied from the function's stack memory to a new memory location.
3. the operation is error prone - if the structure's members are pointers a common error is to assume you are safe to pass the parameter by value, since you are operating on pointers - this can cause very difficult to spot bugs.
4. if your function modifies the value of the input parameters and your inputs are struct variables, passed by value, you have to remember to ALWAYS return a struct variable by value (I've seen this one quite a few times). Which means double the time copying the structure members.

Now getting to what small enough means in terms of size of the struct - so that it's 'worth' passing it by value, that would depend on a few things:

1. the calling convention: what does the compiler automatically save on the stack when calling that function(usually it's the content of a few registers). If your structure members can be copied on the stack taking advantage of this mechanism than there is no penalty.
2. the structure member's data type: if the registers of your machine are 16 bits and your structure's members data type is 64 bit, it obviously won't fit in one registers so multiple operations will have to be performed just for one copy.
3. the number of registers your machine actually has: assuming you have a structure with only one member, a char (8bit). That should cause the same overhead when passing the parameter by value or by reference (in theory). But there is potentially one other danger. If your architecture has separate data and address registers, the parameter passed by value will take up one data register and the parameter passed by reference will take up one address register. Passing the parameter by value puts pressure on the data registers which are usually used more than the address registers. And this may cause spills on the stack.

Bottom line - it's very difficult to say when it's ok to pass a struct by value. It's safer to just not do it :)

Answer 5

Since the argument-passing part of the question is already answered, I'll focus on the returning part.

The best thing to do IMO is to not return structs or pointers to structs at all, but to pass a pointer to the 'result struct' to the function.

void sum(struct Point* result, struct Point* a, struct Point* b);

This has the following advantages:

• The result struct can live either on the stack or on the heap, at the caller's discretion.
• There are no ownership problems, as it is clear that the caller is responsible for allocating and freeing the result struct.
• The structure could even be longer than what is needed, or be embedded in a larger struct.

Answer 6

How a struct is passed to or from a function depends on the application binary interface (ABI) and the procedure call standard (PCS, sometimes included in the ABI) for your target platform (CPU/OS, for some platforms there may be more than one version).

If the PCS actually allows to pass a struct in registers, this not only depends on its size, but also on its position in the argument list and the types of preceeding arguments. ARM-PCS (AAPCS) for instance packs arguments into the first 4 registers until they are full and passes further data onto the stack, even if that means an argument is split (all simplified, if interested: the documents are free for download from ARM).

For structs returned, if they are not passed through registers, most PCS allocate the space on the stack by the caller and pass a pointer to the struct to the callee (implicit variant). This is identical to a local variable in the caller and passing the pointer explicitly - for the callee. However, for the implicit variant, the result has to be copied to another struct, as there is no way to get a reference to the implicitly allocated struct.

Some PCS might do the same for argument structs, others just use the same mechanisms as for scalars. In any way, you defer such optimizations until you really know you need them. Also read the PCS of your target platform. Remember, that your code might perform even worse on a different platform.

Note: passing a struct through a global temp is not used by modern PCS, as it is not thread-safe. For some small microcontroller architectures, this might be different, however. Mostly if they only have a small stack (S08) or restricted features (PIC). But for these most times structs are not passed in registers, either, and pass-by-pointer is strongly recommended.

If it is just for immutability of the original: pass a const mystruct *ptr. Unless you cast away the const that will give a warning at least when writing to the struct. The pointer itself can also be constant: const mystruct * const ptr.

So: No rule of thumb; it depends on too many factors.