Swift Struct Storage

Mike Ash:

We can see that it’s exactly as we expected: when passing the struct to an inout parameter, the struct is laid out contiguously in memory and then a pointer to it is passed in.

[…]

struct storage in Swift is ultimately pretty straightforward, and much of what we’ve seen carries over from C’s much simpler structs. A struct instance is largely treated as a loose collection of independent values, which can be manipulated collectively when required. Local struct variables might be stored on the stack or the individual pieces might be stored in registers, depending on the size of the struct, the register usage of the rest of the code, and the whims of the compiler. Small structs are passed and returned in registers, while larger structs are passed and returned by reference. structs get copied whenever they’re passed and returned. Although you can use structs to implement copy-on-write data types, the base language construct is copied eagerly and more or less blindly.

Language Design Optimization Programming Swift Programming Language Swift Runtime

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