Another nitpick: However, if the name was a very big string, i.e. something like file contents, and it would be necessary to ensure no copies for performan

Another nitpick: However, if the name was a very big string, i.e. something like file contents, and it would be necessary to ensure no copies for performance reasons, the unique_ptr or shared_ptr would come to the rescue This is also not true at all. You can choose to provide a non-templatized function that only accepts an rvalue reference. For example, http://ideone.com/055ViY http://ideone.com/055ViY does not compile. The purpose of the smart pointers unique_ptr and shared_ptr is to annotate ownership for heap allocated objects (unique vs shared ownership). They do help alleviate the thing you're describing, but shouldn't be used so liberally in that way since they heap allocate!