The return of outer would be handled by return value optimization, effectively constructing outer in-place at a caller-defined location.   In this example it would be constructed in temporary stack space. The i refers to the inner i in f1, which is no longer in scope.   In practice, it would probably not crash, as inner has no member variables and do_something() does not dereference the this pointer. The default constructor of outer is only called at the very end of the expression, so I do not understand, what difference it would make in regards to i.   -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von:Jarrad Waterloo via Std-Proposals <std-proposals_at_[hidden]> Gesendet:Fr 25.07.2025 15:33 Betreff:Re: [std-proposals] Standardising 0xdeadbeef for pointers An:std-proposals_at_[hidden]; CC:Jarrad Waterloo <descender76_at_[hidden]>; I am more concerned about point of deletion than creation as in your example.  struct inner {     void do_something(){} };  struct outer {     inner& i; };  outer f1() {     inner i     return outer{i}; }  f1().i. do_something();// crash hopefully  The question is ensuring that the default destructor of outer setting its INTERNAL pointer of i to nullptr instead of it being a noop and the destructor being elided for having no code.