Passing around potentially large objects by value is wasteful and prone to move / copy semantics. Most languages pass objects by reference (C# and Java chief a

Passing around potentially large objects by value is wasteful and prone to move / copy semantics. Most languages pass objects by reference (C# and Java chief among them). Still, if you really want to pass by value -- even though you'll likely end up with pointer ownership problems -- you just add a few functions to the API to do so. Creating an opaque type on the stack can be done, you just need a little more work.