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Unclear section in Overview docs

Open PabloIsCoding opened this issue 9 months ago • 2 comments

https://github.com/odin-lang/odin-lang.org/blob/56ba2d01a1ea53a02b934b70733e9fb04ce8a864/content/docs/overview.md?plain=1#L670C1-L680C4

Hi, I was reading the Odin language overview and I found the above a bit confusing. A few reasons:

  1. The way I understand this, if you pass arguments by value to a function, you are making a copy. It's when you use a pointer like in C that you do not copy. So why do the docs say that you need to generate a copy to have the "pointer behavior" (so to speak)?
  2. If what it's meant is that Odin first makes a copy of the argument, and then you have to copy back the original thing that was passed, how is that done by a line like x := x?
  3. Does this imply some computational penalty because we are making copies?

Since I don't really understand how this works I can't say how this should be rephrased (if at all) but I thought it might be helpful to give some feedback on this.

PabloIsCoding avatar Jun 01 '24 20:06 PabloIsCoding