I don't claim to have any answers, but I found all of this interesting and surprising. I wondered about a couple of things. What happens if the do_stuff_to_foo

I don't claim to have any answers, but I found all of this interesting and surprising. I wondered about a couple of things. What happens if the do_stuff_to_foo is actually defined (and what happens in that actual function)? And is there a difference between value semantics and pointer/reference semantics? These questions were my take-away from one of Chandler Carruth's C++ compiler optimization talks, I think it was this talk. https://youtu.be/eR34r7HOU14 https://youtu.be/eR34r7HOU14 My take aways were that the optimizer gets a huge chunk of its performance by inlining. And with value semantics, the optimizer can "cheat like crazy". So I defined two different variants for do_stuff_to_foo Original Pointer/Reference Semantics: void do_stuff_to_foo(foo* a) { a->x++; } Value Semantics: foo do_stuff_to_foo(foo a) { a.x++; return a; } In both cases, the compiler emits effectively the same output for C and C++ (I only tested clang.) (The main difference was name mangling. I omit stuff for brevity.) Pointer/Reference Semantics: Lcfi2: .cfi_def_cfa_register %rbp incl (%rdi) popq %rbp retq .cfi_endproc ## -- End function .globl _blah ## -- Begin function blah .p2align 4, 0x90 _blah: ## @blah .cfi_startproc ## BB#0: pushq %rbp Lcfi3: .cfi_def_cfa_offset 16 Lcfi4: .cfi_offset %rbp, -16 movq %rsp, %rbp Lcfi5: .cfi_def_cfa_register %rbp movq %rdi, %rax popq %rbp retq .cfi_endproc Value Semantics: Lcfi3: .cfi_offset %rbx, -24 movq %rdi, %rbx incl 16(%rbp) leaq 16(%rbp), %rsi movl $1036, %edx ## imm = 0x40C callq _memcpy movq %rbx, %rax addq $8, %rsp popq %rbx popq %rbp retq .cfi_endproc What I find interesting here is that in both the C and C++ , the memcpy now appears. And in the C case, there is still only one memcpy, not two. So as I said, I don't have any answers and really don't know what the take away is. But RVO no longer seems to be a factor in these variants.