Move semantics in Eigen

Question

I have couple of question about Eigen:

1. Does anyone know if there is any plan to support move semantics in Eigen anytime soon? Couldn't find anything on the TODO list of the Eigen3 web page. Right now I am using the swap trick to get rid of temporaries, like

   MatrixXd foo()
   {
       MatrixXd huge_matrix(N,N); // size N x N where N is quite large
       // do something here with huge_matrix
       return huge_matrix; 
   }
   
   MatrixXd A(N, N); 
   A.swap(foo());
   

   I'd very much like to write the above swap line in a C++11 style like

   A = foo();
   

   and not to have to worry about the temporary returned by foo().

2. Can a C++98/C++03 compiler optimize the code A = foo(); to get rid of this temporary? Or the safest bet is to use swap()?

Answer 1

Copy elision will do the job just fine. Even a C++03 compiler will elide the temporary.
In particular, NRVO (named return value optimization) will, for this code,

MatrixXd foo()
{
    MatrixXd huge_matrix(N,N);
    return huge_matrix; 
}

MatrixXd A = foo();

construct huge_matrix right inside A. The C++03 standard specifies in [class.copy]/15:

This elision of copy operations is permitted in the following circumstances (which may be combined to eliminate multiple copies):

• in a return statement in a function with a class return type, when the expression is the name of a non-volatile automatic object with the same cv-unqualified type as the function return type, the copy operation can be omitted by constructing the automatic object directly into the function’s return value
• when a temporary class object that has not been bound to a reference (12.2) would be copied to a class object with the same cv-unqualified type, the copy operation can be omitted by constructing the temporary object directly into the target of the omitted copy