When are structs the answer?

Question

I\'m doing a raytracer hobby project, and originally I was using structs for my Vector and Ray objects, and I thought a raytracer was the perfect situation to use them: you

Answer 1

If the structs are small, and not too many exist at once, it SHOULD be placing them on the stack (as long as its a local variable and not a member of a class) and not on the heap, this means the GC doesn't need to be invoked and memory allocation/deallocation should be almost instantaneous.

When passing a struct as a parameter to function, the struct is copied, which not only means more allocations/deallocations (from the stack, which is almost instantaneous, but still has overhead), but the overhead in just transferring data between the 2 copies. If you pass via reference, this is a non issue as you are just telling it where to read the data from, rather than copying it.

I'm not 100% sure on this, but i suspect that returning arrays via an 'out' parameter may also give you a speed boost, as memory on the stack is reserved for it and doesn't need to be copied as the stack is "unwound" at the end of function calls.