I think there may be a misunderstanding here regarding the use case. If the vectors are large and allocated on the heap/on an accelerator, then yes, writing out explicit temporaries may be faster. Of course, this does not preclude operator overloading at all: You could write the same code as auto t = vec1 - vec2; t *= 0.5/0.3; t += vec3; t *= 0.3;

However, if the operands are small (e.g. 2/3/4 element vectors are very common), then "unnecessary copies" or move semantics don't come into play at all. These are value types and the compiler would boil them down to the same assembly as the code you post above. Many modern C++ codebases in scientific computing, rendering, or the game industry make use of vector classes with operator overloading, with no performance drawbacks whatsoever; however, code is much more readable, as it matches actual mathematical notation.