Yes, but in an article on copy elision, it doesn't really make sense to talk about small objects because it really doesn't matter if they are copied or not. Pas

Yes, but in an article on copy elision, it doesn't really make sense to talk about small objects because it really doesn't matter if they are copied or not. Pass them by value anyways. What are you referring to about the sorted function - that he says that the compiler isn't smart enough to optimize the copy out of a function returning function argument? His argument makes sense to me here, the caller doesn't know anything about the internals of the function, so it has to allocate separate space for the return value and the function argument, leading to at least one copy. With inline functions or whole program analysis (or some type of link time optimization) it should be smart enough to do this.