On 04/01/2012 04:12 AM, Dave Abrahams wrote:
Hi All,
I am on the C++Now 2012 schedule giving a talk on metaprogramming in C++11, which is really just supposed to be an overview of the state of the art. I am just at the beginnings of my research for this presentation, having learned a few things and done a few experiments, and it seemed to me foolish not to ask the Boost community for its insights. I'm sure y'all have come up with many neat tricks and techniques. If you'd care to share them here, that would be much appreciated.
From a pure meta-programming perspective, I guess the only real addition is variadic templates. However, there is the problem that they're fairly limited and that one may not expand them as the arguments of a non-variadic template. Since I need to integrate with other libraries and tools, I therefore use them very rarely. One very useful use of variadic templates however is with function templates. They allow to make a function template with 0 arguments, which wasn't possible in C++03. This can be used to delay instantiation of the function body which can be necessary if name resolution needs to happen later. This is also possible with the new function template default arguments. A new possibility with C++11 is the use of SFINAE to test arbitrary expressions. I have not found this to be particularly useful in practice, however. Detecting nested types is often good enough. decltype is very useful. I use it in some meta-programming contexts to select a type when I need best-match selection: type0 f(input_iterator_tag); type1 f(forward_iterator_tag); type2 f(bidirectional_iterator_tag); typedef decltype(f(typename std::iterator_traits<T>::iterator_category())) result; The only thing we could do before C++11 was return a type with a unique size, then associate that size to a type.