Is it a good practice to pass struct object as parameter to a function in c++?

Question

I tried an example live below:

typedef struct point
{
    int x;
    int y;
} point;

void cp(point p)
{
    cout<<p.x<<endl;
    cout<<p.y<<endl;
}

int main()
{
    point p1;
    p1.x=1;
    p1.y=2;
    cp(p1);
}

The result thats printed out is:

1
2

which is what I expected. My question is: Does parameter p get the full copy of object p1? If so, I wonder if this is a good practice? (I assumed when the struct gets big in size, this will create a lot of copy overhead).

Answer 1

Yes, there's nothing wrong with this and yes, p is a complete copy of p1. I wouldn't call a struct with two ints large, but if the struct does get large and if you don't need to alter it in the function body you could consider passing it by const reference:

void cp(const point& p)
{
    // ...
}