> come with the possibility of indirection at every turn due to not having the distinction between dereference and member access Most managed languages don’t e

> come with the possibility of indirection at every turn due to not having the distinction between dereference and member access Most managed languages don’t expose the location of an object, only its semantics. With optimizations (escape analysis), an object can be allocated on the stack and thus only effectively make member accesses. This optimization can be done much more deterministically with value types — if an object looses identity then the runtime/compile time doesn’t have to reason about whether it leaves the function/loop, it is free to copy it in/out of functions as often as needed. As for preferences, it makes sense in low-level languages, but imo hiding it is the correct choice on a higher level — this is a core benefit of GCs, e.g. your public APIs will be much more maintainable/won’t need refactors because they don’t expose low-level implementation details (where should that argument be stored), only its semantics.