On Wednesday, 19 June 2019 at 21:06:48 UTC, XavierAP wrote:
Now with an rvalue returned from get, interesting, no copy.
Still, I wonder what really happened. Again, moving between
stacks would still be work. And a different optimization can
explain this non copy, for example inlining.
My guess as to what may be happening (I've never used a
disassembler and I wasn't planning on starting today yet) is
simple. The rvalue returned by get() is possibly not popped out
from the stack, but rather left in the same place as sum() is
called on it. This is actually optimum, but hardly an
optimization, rather it's the easiest and least effort for the
compiler. Again this would mean no moving -- which is good,
because moving is work.
And also, this doesn't work in the general case. If parameters
are by value, everything works perfect when I pass rvalues (but
we already knew that, not answering my question); however if I
pass lvalues they will be copied every time.
So my question is open... what about const ref rvalue parameters?
Or another possible optimization: in case the function is
declared with const parameters (not ref), lvalues can be accessed
by ref as an optimization; and rvalues can use the same trick
they do now. As a consequence, no unnecessary copies ever --
thanks to const. This is even better because I don't have to type
so many ref, which were never part of the algorithm but baby
instructions for the dumb compiler (const & everywhere is one of
the ugliest and most annoying things in C++).
