Return class objects

[Stewbond]

Question: When overloading operators, I find myself needing to return an instance of an object, but I've run into some problems:

This won't work because the local object 'product' is destroyed at the end of the scope so the reference doesn't point anywhere useful

Foo& Foo::operator* (Foo& rhs)
{
  Foo product(); // Default constructor
  // do math
  return product
}

This works, but there is a serious memory leak here since I lose my only pointer to the object and don't want to make the user of the class deal with memory management of this class

Foo& Foo::operator* (Foo& rhs)
{
  Foo* product = new Foo();
  // do math
  return *product;
}

This also works as long as I custom-define a copy constructor, however that seems ineffecient

Foo Foo::operator* (Foo& rhs)
{
  Foo product();
  // do math
  return product;
}

It seems ineffecient, because if I also want to make this an effective base class, I can't rely on operators (as those functions aren't inherited) so I'd do this to make operator definitions easy, but it invokes 2 copy constructors!

Foo Foo::multiply(Foo& rhs)
{
  Foo product();
  // do math
  return product;
}

Foo Foo::operator*(Foo& rhs)
{
  return multiply(rhs);
}

Is there a better way to do this?

[Stewbond]

Actually, upon testing my compiler optimizes this (Even with /Od) so that the copy constructor is only called once.

This is actually a non-issue. nevermind.