[kasey_junk]

That depends on the architecture, the os, the compiler & the runtime.

Part of the confusion in teaching pointers (I think) is that we act like they are a lower level abstraction than they are (because they used to be). On modern commodity hardware with mainstream languages pointers have very little to do with memory addresses. Accessing memory via them will not happen in constant time, they may or may not perform better when used, even if the language doesn’t copy them on use the OS or processor might etc.

I just find when I try to teach people the memory address model of pointers there are so many exceptions that the model isn’t helpful. Like the OP I struggle with an alternative.