By Sy Brand
Dynamic polymorphism in C++ has historically meant virtual functions and inheritance. However, these form only one possible design for solving this problem, and they bring several implications on performance, ergonomics and flexibility.
Type erasure is another way to implement dynamic polymorphism, as demonstrated in several talks by Sean Parent and adopted in other languages, such as Rust’s trait objects. But implementing type erasing objects which provide ergonomic interfaces in C++ is cumbersome and error-prone, leading to a large family of types and libraries with subtly different semantics and lower adoption rates compared to inheritance.
This talk will present a possible future design for interface-based type erasure in C++ that marries the convenience of inheritance to the benefits which it otherwise lacks. It will introduce the code injection and metaclasses facilities which are proposed for inclusion in C++ along with a prototype implementation of the design based on the experimental metaclasses Clang fork.
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