Operator + for matrices in C++

Question

I suppose the naive implementation of a + operator for matrices (2D for instance) in C++ would be:

class Matrix {

  Matrix operator+ (const Matrix & other) const {
      Matrix result;
      // fill result with *this.data plus other.data
      return result;
  }
}

so we could use it like

Matrix a;
Matrix b;
Matrix c;

c = a + b;

Right?

But if matrices are big this is not efficient as we are doing one not-necessary copy (return result).

Therefore, If we wan't to be efficient we have to forget the clean call:

c = a + b;

Right?

What would you suggest / prefer ? Thanks.

Answer 1

The C++ standard gives permission for the compiler to elide the unnecessary copy in this case (it's called the "named return value optimization", usually abbreviated to NRVO). There's a matching "RVO" for when you return a temporary instead of a named variable.

Nearly all reasonably recent C++ compilers implement both NRVO and RVO, so generally speaking you can ignore the fact that this construct wouldn't otherwise be particularly efficient.

Edit: I was, of course, talking about the copy involved in returning the new matrix holding the result of the addition. You probably do want to either pass the input by const reference:

Matrix operator+(Matrix const &other) const { 
    Matrix result;
    // ...
    return result;
}

...or else, pass by value, but return the passed value:

Matrix operator+(Matrix other) const { 
    other += *this;
    return other;
}

Note that this depends on commutativity though (i.e., it's really doing b+a instead of a+b) so while it's fine for addition, it won't work for some other operations.