The misapplication of that mantra doesn’t justify the design damage done by dogmatically passing everything by ref. There’s no hard and fast rule here. Even if

The misapplication of that mantra doesn’t justify the design damage done by dogmatically passing everything by ref. There’s no hard and fast rule here. Even if there was, optimizers still occasionally surprise seasoned native devs in both positive and negative ways. Glad the author’s first instinct was to pull out profiling tools.