Yes that was what I was thinking as well, std::move on the return value of a function that returns some private member by value makes no sense (someone please c

Yes that was what I was thinking as well, std::move on the return value of a function that returns some private member by value makes no sense (someone please correct me if I’m mistaken here). In the example in the article, the compiler may be able to perform all kinds of optimizations for example because the result is assigned to a const lvalue, and depending on the rest of the code in that function (which is not shown) it may be able to infer the assigned variable can never be aliased, so that’s one possible reason why the disassembly may be surprising. The C++ specification only prescribes how code should behave but it explicitly does not put restrictions how the compiler achieves that effect, to the point whole functions might be completely absent in the produced binary and replaced by a constant if it's possible to calculate the result of every invocation at compile time.