After reading this article on Herb Sutter's blog, I experimented a bit and ran into something that puzzles me. I am using Visual C++ 2005, but I would be surprised if this was implementation dependent.
Here is my code:
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
struct Base {
//Base() {}
~Base() { cout << "~Base()" << endl; }
};
int main()
{
const Base & f = Base();
}
When run, it displays "~Base()
" twice... But if I un-comment the constructor, it displays it only once!
Does anyone have an explanation for this?
This IS implementation-dependent.
The standard allows a copy to occur when binding a temporary to a const reference. In your case, VC++ performs a copy only when the constructor is implicitly defined. This is unexpected, but permitted.
CWG Issue 391 - Require direct binding of short-lived references to rvalues has fixed this for C++11.