Sid Sacek escribió:
Sorry, but your design is flawed.
This code should compile according to your design and the C# rules, but it doesn't. For it to actually be C# compliant, a property must take up no space at all, but yours does, unfortunately. Since you're embedding an object inside another object, I don't see how you can use this design to achieve that goal. No disrespect.
This is indeed true, but it will always be the case for a member object. Since the technique already relies on undefined behaviour (derreferencing a null pointer or calling offsetof on a non-POD type), it may do so again and pack all properties inside a union. This will fix the space overhead to the minimum, regardless of the number of properties. Check Boost.Proto internals for the definition of virtual_member, it applies such trick. I don't think I'll choose syntactic sugar if the cost is relying on undefined behaviour. Agustín K-ballo Bergé.-