Re: non-const reference and const reference

From:
=?Utf-8?B?R2Vvcmdl?= <George@discussions.microsoft.com>
Newsgroups:
microsoft.public.vc.language
Date:
Tue, 18 Dec 2007 03:46:00 -0800
Message-ID:
<6CA45873-52D5-4C95-8451-17F1D859E6E8@microsoft.com>
Thanks Abhishek,

I have tested your code. You are correct. In Visual Studio 2008, the
invocation sequences are,

1. call constructor with 10;
2. call constructor with 20;
3. call constructor with 30;
4. call destructor with 10;
5. call destructor with 20.

How did the compiler think internally to optimize the code to remove
invocation to copy constructor?

regards,
George

"Abhishek Padmanabh" wrote:

On Dec 18, 2:57 pm, George <Geo...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

Hi Alex,

I lost your points in your reply. You gave us two choices,

1. const X& result = X(1) + X(2);

2. X result = X(1) + X(2);

Which one do you think is optimized? why?


To me, as of now, both look the same from optimization point of view
i.e. for compilers that support RVO (and are capable of copy
construction elision - with VS2005, I don't get any copy constructor
calls even with optimizations disabled - its pretty good! semantically
there would be 2 - one for the return by value and while copy
construction of ref with that returned value). Here is the code that I
tested and it does not call the copy constructor in any of the cases
(uncomment to see):

#include<iostream>
struct A
{
   int i;
   A(int i_):i(i_){std::cout << "constructor\n";}
   A(const A& rhs) : i(rhs.i){std::cout << "copy constructor\n";}
   A& operator=(const A& rhs){i=rhs.i;std::cout << "assignment operator
\n";}
   A operator+(const A& rhs)
   {
       return A(i+rhs.i);
   }
   ~A(){std::cout << "destructor\n";}
};

int main()
{
    const A ref = A(10) + A(20);
    //const A& ref = A(10) + A(20);
    //A ref = A(10) + A(20);
    std::cout << ref.i << std::endl;
    return 0;
}

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