2015-05-05 17:21 GMT+08:00 Boris Rasin <boris@pointx.org>:
On 5/5/2015 9:31 AM, Thijs (M.A.) van den Berg wrote:
tuple_vector<Point, Line, Rectangle, Circle> shapes;
shapes.push_back(Point{1.0, 1.0} );
This is neat, but it' not quite the same thing. Unlike std::vector<boost::any>, your tuple_vector does not organize objects into strictly linear arrangement. Using your example, there is no way to draw shapes in the order they were inserted into container.
Good point! So it loses overall ordering, only preservers it at the type level. The reason is that objects gets stored in linear memory per type.
One could conceivably add another internal container to maintain overall index. But than again, is such tuple_vector<Point, Line, Rectangle, Circle> really better than std::vector<boost::variant<Point, Line, Rectangle, Circle>>? It would use less memory per object when some stored types are smaller than others, and in some circumstances these savings would exceed overhead of multiple internal containers and an additional index container. Any other advantages?
If the data sequence shows some affinity, I guess an ordered tuple_vector-based sequence can provide some performance benefit in traversal (with some crafted for_each method). That is, a sequence of [AAABBB] may be traversed faster than [ABABAB] for such a container, and I believe in the later case such that the types are uniformly distributed, vector<variant> will perform better.