C++: A prvalue is not a temporary

C++ is so complicated that I had to almost fail my exam and few years later I had to relearn C, get some experience in a real business project, and then I could start learning C++.

I find that understanding how memory is layed out in executable, how the C works in terms of stack, symbols etc is the introductory knowledge I had to obtain to even think about C++. Not sure what's there now, because I saw recently some great compiler warnings, but I'm pretty sure that I did convert a prvalue to a pointer reference (&) at least once in my life and later failed with memory problems, but no compiler errors

Interesting stuff! I knew about lvalues and rvalues but I never knew about concepts like "glvalue" or "prvalue" or "xvalue" that the linked page talks about.

It makes sense that C++ avoids unnecessary copying or object creation whenever possible, that's pretty much C++'s M.O.

> People sometimes call this “a temporary”, but, as is the main point of this article, that’s not necessarily true.

Old habits die hard? It used to always create a temporary right?

[Edited] For anyone like me stuck on his language: the phrase "move from" should be understood as a technical term loosely related to the English language meaning of the words. I think the post would be better if he explained this terminology; as it is you have to know an awful lot about the topic he is writing about to even parse what he is saying.

There is a pretty good stack overflow post that quuxplusone linked below. How they explain it:

  Moving from lvalues

  Sometimes, we want to move from lvalues. That is, sometimes we want the compiler to treat an lvalue as if it were an rvalue, so it can invoke the move constructor, even though it could be potentially unsafe. For this purpose, C++11 offers a standard library function template called std::move inside the header <utility>. This name is a bit unfortunate, because std::move simply casts an lvalue to an rvalue; it does not move anything by itself. It merely enables moving. Maybe it should have been named std::cast_to_rvalue or std::enable_move, but we are stuck with the name by now.