This is an unofficial snapshot of the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG21 Core Issues List revision 115e. See http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/ for the official list.

2024-11-11

664. Direct binding of references to non-class rvalue references

[Voted into WP at March, 2010 meeting as document N3055.]

According to 9.4.4 [dcl.init.ref] paragraph 5, a reference initialized with a reference-compatible rvalue of class type binds directly to the object. A reference-compatible non-class rvalue reference, however, is first copied to a temporary and the reference binds to that temporary, not to the target of the rvalue reference. This can cause problems when the result of a forwarding function is used in such a way that the address of the result is captured. For example:

    struct ref {
        explicit ref(int&& i): p(&i) { }
        int* p;
    };

    int&& forward(int&& i) {
        return i;
    }

    void f(int&& i) {
        ref r(forward(i));
        // Here r.p is a dangling pointer, pointing to a defunct int temporary
    }

A formulation is needed so that rvalue references are treated like class and array rvalues.

Notes from the February, 2008 meeting:

You can't just treat scalar rvalues like class and array rvalues, because they might not have an associated object. However, if you have an rvalue reference, you know that there is an object, so probably the best way to address this issue is to specify somehow that binding a reference to an rvalue reference does not introduce a new temporary.

(See also issues 690 and 846.)

Proposed resolution (February, 2010):

See paper N3030.