On Tue, Dec 17, 2024 at 8:00 AM Neil Groves via Boost <boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:
The free function is clearly the objectively superior solution. This is fact and is preferred over opinions no matter the authority.
The member function approach is objectively inferior, and has no compensatory advantage.
I really don't think this is true at all. For one, unordered containers have transparent lookup which I'd imagine might actually complicate things. My opinion on it is that people really only want optional<T&> interfaces in the associative containers and nothing else. You can feel free to objectively totally prove me wrong here but I think if we just updated the base set of containers, that'd make all of our users happy. Especially because member functions work better with code completion and Intellisense. A good rule of thumb in software engineering is to start with the concrete and abstract later. - Christian