Date
1999-10-15.00:00:00
Message id
85

Content

Proposed Resolution (10/99):

[Note: a small portion of this wording is superseded by the resolution of issue 185.]

The paragraph in question should be rewritten as follows. In addition, references to this section should be added to the index under "temporary, elimination of," "elimination of temporary," and "copy, constructor elision."

    When certain criteria are met, an implementation is allowed to omit the copy construction of a class object, even if the copy constructor and/or destructor for the object have side effects. In such cases, the implementation treats the source and target of the omitted copy operation as simply two different ways of referring to the same object, and the destruction of that object occurs at the later of the times when the two objects would have been destroyed without the optimization [footnote: Because only one object is destroyed instead of two, and one copy constructor is not executed, there is still one object destroyed for each one constructed. end footnote]. This elision of copy operations is permitted in the following circumstances (which may be combined to eliminate multiple copies):
    • in a return statement in a function with a class return type, where the expression is the name of a non-volatile automatic object with the same cv-unqualified type as the function return type, the copy operation can be omitted by constructing the automatic object directly into the function's return value

    • when a temporary class object (6.7.7 [class.temporary] ) would be copied to a class object with the same cv-unqualified type, the copy operation can be omitted by constructing the temporary object directly into the target of the omitted copy
    [Example:
        class Thing {
        public:
            Thing();
            ~Thing();
            Thing(const Thing&);
        };
    
        Thing f() {
            Thing t;
            return t;
        }
    
        Thing t2 = f();
    
Here the criteria for elision can be combined to eliminate two calls to the copy constructor of class Thing: the copying of the local automatic object t into the temporary object for the return value of function f() and the copying of that temporary object into object t2. Effectively, the construction of the local object t can be viewed as directly initializing the global object t2, and that object's destruction will occur at program exit. —end example]