Where are temporary object stored?

Question

IMO temporary objects are stored in dynamic (heap) memory, but I\'m not sure. Can you please confirm or deny my thoughts?

Answer 1

This is highly implementation dependent, but they probably reside in automatic storage.

Note that the scope can be counter-intuitive, because of optimizations.

The following:

class A
{
//...
};

//....

A foo()
{
   A a;
   return a;
}

Here, the object a doesn't necessarily reside only inside the function's scope, but RVO can occur.

Also, when passing by value a temporary object, it might not get destructed immediately.

void foo(A a);
//...

foo( A() );

Here, a temporary is not necessarily only alive in that line, but can be constructed directly inside the method's argument stack.