Variadic templates are a typical feature of C++: from the user’s perspective, they are easy to use, but from the implementor’s perspective, they look pretty scary. Today’s post is mainly about the implementor’s perspective.
Due to the C++ core guidelines, “Templates are the backbone of C++’s support for generic programming and class hierarchies the backbone of its support for object-oriented programming. The two language mechanisms can be combined effectively, but a few design pitfalls must be avoided.” Let me see what this means.
My post for today is just loosely coupled to the rules of the C++ core guidelines because they do provide not much content. Inspired by the guidelines, today’s post concerns a generic isSmaller function.
Template definitions deal with guidelines that are specific to a template implementation. This means, in particular, these rules focus on how a template definition depends on its context.
There is, in particular, one rule left to template interfaces which are quite interesting: T.47: Avoid highly visible unconstrained templates with common names. Admittedly, the rule T47 is often the reason for unexpected behavior because the wrong function is called.
The topic for today is quite important when you create your type: Regular and SemiRegular types.
Last week I was at two conferences in Berlin: Meeting Embedded and Meeting C++. Here are my impressions from both conferences.
This post is about template interfaces due to the C++ core guidelines: “…a critical concept”, because a template interface is “a contract between a user and an implementer – and should be carefully designed.”.
An interface is a contract between a user and an implementer and should, therefore, be written with great care. This also holds true if you pass an operation as an argument.
Based on my book “The C++ Standard Library” educative.io created an interactive course. You can have it now at a discount. “C++ Standard Library including C++14 & C++17” is a interactive journey through the current C++ standard Library.