Similarly to how we can assign a value to an object with an lvalue reference, copying it, we can also move the values from an object to another without constructing a new one. We call this move assignment. We move the values from one object to another existing object.
For this, we will have to overload operator =
, not so that it takes an lvalue reference, like in copy assignment, but so that it takes an rvalue reference.
class A {
int a;
A& operator= (A&& other) {
this->a = other.a;
other.a = 0;
return *this;
}
};
This is the typical syntax to define move assignment. We overload operator =
so that we can feed it an rvalue reference and it can assign it to another object.
A a;
a.a = 1;
A b;
b = std::move(a); //calling A& operator= (A&& other)
std::cout << a.a << std::endl; //0
std::cout << b.a << std::endl; //1
Thus, we can move assign an object to another one.