Question

I’m trying to achieve the following optimization in my container library:

• when inserting an lvalue-referenced element, copy it to internal storage;
• but when inserting rvalue-referenced element, move it if supported.

The optimization is supposed to be useful e.g. if contained element type is something like std::vector, where moving if possible would give substantial speedup.

However, so far I was unable to devise any working scheme for this. My container is quite complicated, so I can’t just duplicate insert() code several times: it is large. I want to keep all “real” code in some inner helper, say do_insert() (may be templated) and various insert()-like functions would just call that with different arguments.

My best bet code for this (a prototype, of course, without doing anything real):

#include <iostream>
#include <utility>

struct element
{
  element () { };
  element (element&&) { std::cerr << "moving\n"; }
};

struct container
{
  void  insert (const element& value)
  {  do_insert (value);  }

  void  insert (element&& value)
  {  do_insert (std::move (value));  }

private:
  template <typename Arg>
  void  do_insert (Arg arg)
  {  element  x (arg);  }
};

int
main ()
{
  {
    // Shouldn't move.
    container  c;
    element x;
    c.insert (x);
  }

  {
    // Should move.
    container  c;
    c.insert (element ());
  }
}

However, this doesn’t work at least with GCC 4.4 and 4.5: it never prints “moving” on stderr. Or is what I want impossible to achieve and that’s why emplace()-like functions exist in the first place?

Answer 1

I think you may need to forward the argument:

  template <typename Arg>
  void  do_insert (Arg&& arg)
  {  element  x (std::forward<Arg>(arg));  }

---

Full code:

#include <iostream>
#include <utility>

struct element
{
  element () { };
  element (const element&) { std::cerr << "copying\n"; }
  element (element&&) { std::cerr << "moving\n"; }
};

struct container
{
  void  insert (const element& value)
  {  do_insert (value);  }

  void  insert (element&& value)
  {  do_insert (std::move(value));  }

private:
  template <typename Arg>
  void  do_insert (Arg&& arg)
  {  element  x (std::forward<Arg>(arg));  }
};

int
main ()
{
  {
    // Shouldn't move.
    container  c;
    element x;
    c.insert (x);
  }
  {
    // Should move.
    container  c;
    c.insert (element ());
  }
}

The keyword that you might look for is “perfect forwarding”.