Avoiding constructing objects using proxy objects

Eager evaluation can have the undesirable effect that objects are unnecessarily constructed. Often this is not a problem, but if the objects are expensive to construct (because of heap allocations, for example), there might be legitimate reasons to optimize away the unnecessary construction of short-lived objects that serve no purpose.

Comparing concatenated strings using a proxy

We will now walk through a minimal example of using proxy objects to give you an idea of what they are and can be used for. It's not meant to provide you with a general production-ready solution to optimizing string comparisons.

With that said, take a look at this code snippet that concatenates two strings and compares the result:

auto a = std::string{"Cole"}; 
auto b = std::string{"Porter"}; 
auto c = std::string{"ColePorter"}; 
auto is_equal = (a + b) == c;        // true

Here is a visual representation...