Normally they’re not, that’s really specific to C++ nonsense.
In a normal value-semantics system if you have a pointer you just copy the pointer. Obviously if the langage doesn’t have your back it also means you’ve now fucked up your ownership, but you’re in C so that was to be expected.
Yeah, this was my assumption when I read the original comment, so I was confused about what it was saying (I thought it was suggesting you should pass references instead of doing a bitwise-copy most of the time, which is just plausible enough that I believed it for a minute) until I read further down in the thread and realized they meant implicit heap-cloning
