This is the most vexing parse here:
howmany t( howmany() );
In order to fix this you need to add an extra set of parens:
howmany t( (howmany()) );
^ ^
clang
is very helpful here and warns you:
warning: parentheses were disambiguated as a function declaration [-Wvexing-parse]
howmany t( howmany() );
^~~~~~~~~~~~~
main.cpp:31:12: note: add a pair of parentheses to declare a variable
howmany t( howmany() );
^
( )
The other way to fix this is to use C++11 uniform initialization syntax:
howmany t{ howmany{} };
^ ^^ ^
Update
To address part 2
which you added to the question the draft standard allows for omission of the copy/move construction in some cases. We can see this from section 12.8
Copying and moving class objects paragraph 31 which says:
When certain criteria are met, an implementation is allowed to omit the copy/move construction of a class object, even if the constructor selected for the copy/move operation and/or the destructor for the object have side effects. In such cases, the implementation treats the source and target of the omitted copy/move operation as simply two different ways of referring to the same object, and the destruction of that object occurs at the later of the times when the two objects would have been destroyed without the optimization.122 This elision of copy/move operations, called copy elision, is permitted in the following circumstances
and includes the following bullet:
when a temporary class object that has not been bound to a reference (12.2) would be copied/moved to a class object with the same cv-unqualified type, the copy/move operation can be omitted by constructing the temporary object directly into the target of the omitted copy/move