Trent Hill wrote: [...]
int main(int a_argc, char **a_argv) { C c; boost::bind(&foo, c); return EXIT_SUCCESS; }
results in this output (Visual C++ .NET with /O2):
C(const C &c) C(const C &c) C(const C &c) C(const C &c)
Four copies - I had hoped to only see a single copy. Logically, there doesn't seem to be a need for more than one copy. Is there an implementation issue that requires this many copies?
Not really, but eliminating the unnecessary copies is (relatively) hard, at least with the current code base (it has been developed with portability in mind and supports VC6, among others). The specification requires one copy. One more is almost unavoidable. The other two can be eliminated, in theory. But...
I was hoping to use bind with some moderately weighted objects, however the number of copies that seem to occur may be prohibitive for me.
... please note that the copies occur at bind time. In a typical scenario you bind once and call O(N) times (or bind and store in a function<> with the associated dynamic memory allocation), so this isn't usually a problem. And, as others have pointed out, there's always ref(). ;-)