OTOH, in addition to the insignificant performance hit, there may be a very significant maintenance hit. A future maintainer (maybe even the original author of the code!) may take a look at the superfluous ref/deref process, think "What the...?!?", and start looking through a ton of code for some clue as to why such a non-standard and round-about approach was used.

The considerate thing to do is to avoid setting someone else (or, again, maybe even yourself) up for such a wild-goose chase.