That's not really the same thing though - that's a choice of representation for optimization purposes. LLVM won't turn a pointer access into a value copy - it c

That's not really the same thing though - that's a choice of representation for optimization purposes. LLVM won't turn a pointer access into a value copy - it can't, because that would change program behavior. The distinction here is that in a lot of cases, you really do want to edit data in one location and there's no good reason for it to be copied except that it makes the program easier to reason about (exceptions apply for when things like cache locality considerations come into play).